Philosophical pragmatism and the critique of liberal peace

Since the late 1970s, pragmatism has been revived in different disciplines through the work of Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Hilary Putnam, among others,Footnote ²⁰ and more recently via the writings of Bruno LatourFootnote ²¹ and other French theorists.Footnote ²² In the IR literature, pragmatism has only recently moved to the fore and it is mainly used in two interrelated ways.Footnote ²³ First, it is seen as an eclectic method that mediates intra-disciplinary battles – for example, between structuralist and poststructuralist theories. This is possible because pragmatism is open to use any theory that works for a particular problem and, at the same time, it accepts constant revisionism, discarding epistemological purity.Footnote ²⁴ Second, it has gained traction as an approach in itself that seeks to account for social reality (‘a new ism’ – although pragmatism rejects relying on firm grounds). Rather than approaching social reality by applying principles established a priori, pragmatism draws on a continued process of inquiry: a process that relies on previous experience, but copes creatively with new problems as they emerge; a process that accounts for continuity and change at the same time.Footnote ²⁵ In this sense, most scholars concur on the primacy of ‘practice’, proposing to study IR through investigating the doings and sayings of diverse actors.Footnote ²⁶ By engaging with practices, pragmatist approaches account for social reality without either resorting to absolute foundations as positivist theories do, or falling into the relativist ‘anything goes’ approach of some post-positive thinkers.Footnote ²⁷ This second understanding of pragmatism is particularly useful for this article, as peacebuilding is currently being reinterpreted as a sustained process of inquiry.

Pragmatist approaches have been utilised, for example, in debates on ethics and security,Footnote ²⁸ humanitarian intervention and responsibility,Footnote ²⁹ or international climate politics.Footnote ³⁰ However, pragmatism has rarely been thought of in relation to international peacebuilding. A notable exception is the recent ‘Peacebuilding in an Era of Pragmatism’ Special Issue in International Affairs. The diverse authors use pragmatism heuristically to reflect on the move away from the liberal model and think through current concerns with stability and fostering societal resilience and organic forms of peace. That is, as a ‘lens that brings into dialogue perspectives on the realpolitik of stabilisation, the apparent retreat of liberal idealism, and the bottom-up focus on contextualizing efforts to sustain peace’.Footnote ³¹ Comparably, other authors have also noted that the inclusion of the idea of resilience in contemporary forms of governance has accommodated a new pragmatist rationale, with emphasis on ownership and tailor-made practices, as well as a predisposition to consider the practical consequences of interventions and the likelihood of failure.Footnote ³² This article furthers these contributions theoretically, by using Dewey's pragmatism as a lens to think the transition from liberal statebuilding to hybrid forms of sustaining peace that acknowledge the effects of intervening practices. In the final section, it also adds to them a fresh and pragmatist look into ‘the field’,Footnote ³³ to understand the source of the discontent expressed by practitioners.

In the 1920s, Dewey wrote about pragmatism in a context of crisis and pessimism about democracy driven by a perceived lack of representation between ‘the officials’ and ‘the public’ – the government and the individuals, which are gathered around the indirect consequences of their interactions.Footnote ³⁴ Contrary to core assumptions in democratic theory, Dewey argued that practices, technology, and bureaucracies, that emerged as indirect effects of the First War World, led the public to evolve and diverge from the direct relation with its officials and representative bodies.Footnote ³⁵ Similarly, current practices of peacebuilding are spurred by the disillusionment with liberal peace, liberal democracy, and the purpose of humanitarianism.Footnote ³⁶

For much of the decade of the 2000s, frameworks of international peacebuilding sought to address conflicts through hands-on processes of reforming and strengthening state institutions to promote liberal democracy. Although the reasons for war and state failure were considered to differ across countries – from predatory war-prone leaders to Islamic conservatism, to ethno-nationalist divisions and confrontations – ‘statebuilding’ seemed to be the answer. As Ghani and Lockhart stated:

Statebuilding ‘to regulate human behaviour’ was introduced to improve the results of interventions in the 1990s, which had relied on humanitarian aid and the promotion of democratisation and liberalisation processes without creating the necessary societal conditions and institutions for stabilising them.Footnote ³⁸ However, the optimism about statebuilding policies declined significantly, as societies intervened in made little forward progress. The consolidation of warlords and the fragility of the security sector in Afghanistan, the renewal of large-scale violence in the DRC or the political and economic stagnation of Balkan societies, to name some paradigmatic cases, questioned the efficiency and legitimacy of internationally driven processes of peace- and statebuilding.

Numerous critiques have emerged over the years in response to the continuous difficulties encountered by international engagements. In the decade of the 2000s, some studies criticised the emasculation of the sovereign state in internationalised processes of statebuilding,Footnote ³⁹ while others highlighted that interventions reinforced neoliberal logics, harmful to postwar countries, while neglecting global capitalist structures as key causes of conflict.Footnote ⁴⁰ The focus here is on another group of scholars, who have been influential in the recalibration of peacebuilding practice, through pointing to the ‘effects’ of top-down practices of statebuilding, denouncing a constant neglect of the culture, needs, and everyday experiences of indigenous societies.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, some have explained the lack of success of liberal interventions by examining how the infra-political areas and economies of local societies resist international norms and institutions articulated from the top-down.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, others have emphasised the non-linearity and complexity of statebuilding processes, denouncing the too abstract, simplistic, and reductive categories used by practitioners.Footnote ⁴³

While these critiques are well known to the readers of the journal, here they are reappraised in the light of pragmatism. In essence, these scholars explain the failure of liberal approaches to peacebuilding by noticing that these have sought to address the causes of war by means of building institutions and creating strong functioning states according to Western models. This critique was similarly articulated by Dewey when examining theories of government that had been built upon ‘the taking of causal agency instead of consequences as the heart of the problem’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Searching for causal forces that explain phenomena is problematic, we learn from Dewey, because these will remain shadowy and can never fully account for the facts and outcomes they are supposed to produce. In his words:

According to critical scholars, liberal peace identified all too easily the causes of problems (such as the lack of liberal democracy or the fragility of rule-of-law institutions) and believed that solutions could be found hastily – without the need for a cautious investigation that could dig deeply into the complex settings and sociocultural milieus of conflict-affected societies.Footnote ⁴⁶ International engagements have not only been under an illusion as to the causes of conflicts, they have also been deluded in expecting ‘extraordinary change to follow from a mere change in political agency and methods’.Footnote ⁴⁷

By engaging with the realities and everyday life of postconflict societies, these scholars have come to terms with the ‘disparity’ between the principles and assumptions of liberal peace and the distorted results carried out by the practices implementing the principles.Footnote ⁴⁸ Peacebuilding almost never consists of a linear and calculated process that results in liberal outcomes; instead, it is a non-linear, unpredictable process in which local agents resist, modify, ignore, co-opt, adapt, and contest international perspectives.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even in cases that are apparently successful, processes have been re-appropriated and changed, readjusted according to local forms of order.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Dewey suggests, all political processes carry invisible and ‘indirect consequences’ and thus encourage unplanned ‘responsive adjustments’; in the end, results are ‘a skew’, a ‘deflection’, a ‘distortion’, different from the principles and ideas purposed in advance.Footnote ⁵¹

Rather than seeing the deflections and deviations of original principles as problematic, critics are open to appraising them as valuable resources for peace.Footnote ⁵² Berit Blieseman de Guevara writes: ‘in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the complex and often unintentional effects sparked off by contemporary attempts of statebuilding, it is necessary to turn attention to the political and social processes that accompany them’Footnote ⁵³ Thus, the alternative to the liberal peace does not consist in developing another set of principles that could work in practice or political institutions that could tackle the causes of war. Rather than imposing external plans that originate in abstract thinking, emancipatory forms of peacebuilding – like ‘hybrid peace’ – are real and existing possibilities that emanate from within contemporary war-affected zones.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although hybridisation may sometimes generate negative effects,Footnote ⁵⁵ when the process is reflexive, inclusive of diverse perspectives and rooted in the everyday life of indigenous groups critical scholars predict hopeful outcomes.Footnote ⁵⁶ In sum, in abandoning abstract and universal principles and instead engaging with concrete and contexts-specific situations, emancipatory forms of peacebuilding shift focus from addressing the causes of war (liberal peace) to concerns with the consequences of peacebuilding processes (hybrid peace).

Inasmuch as this critique annuls top-down peace operations, it feeds a new orientation in policy frameworks: strategies become more open to local contexts and build upon a processual understanding of intervention mechanisms, which must be flexible and adapt to crises and complex settings. Three brief examples from critical work that is being translated into policy recommendations help making the point. First, the EU-funded research project EU-CIVCAP (2016–18) is meant to provide the EU with recommendations for conflict prevention and sustaining peace. After determining that the decisive challenge is to narrow ‘the gap between the rhetorical commitment to local ownership by international actors, and its implementation in practice’, the policy recommendations are blatant: the knowledge and expertise of local interlocutors is key; ‘donor programmes should be tailored to the resources available to support them’; more comprehensive analysis of the consequences, of ‘the winners and losers in any process reform’, is required; as well as ‘extending the duration of deployment’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Similarly, another EU-funded project (WOSCAP, 2015–17) puts forward ‘a whole-of-society approach to peacebuilding and conflict prevention’ that is indicative of attempts to think the implementation of peacebuilding in pragmatist terms. ‘Whole of society’ is ‘a practice-based approach which seeks to enhance the effectiveness of externally led peacebuilding and conflict preventions through recourse to the social contexts within which they are implemented’ and ‘a systematic involvement with the breadth and diversity of actors which operate at multiple levels’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This critique redirects interventions away from a problem-solving and ideologically driven exercise. Rather than being imagined or constructed in the abstract, and applied and implemented accordingly thereafter, policies emerge out of an exploratory and creative process where multiple actors cooperate, partner, and contest evolving perspectives, experiences, and interests.Footnote ⁵⁹

A third example can be found in Séverine Autesserre's influential work in policy spheres, which brings forward an idea of peace that does not precede practice. Drawing on fieldwork research in Timor-Leste and the DRC, she calls attention to the effects of dominant modes of operation of international peacebuilders. She explains that, although well intended and committed to local ownership, practitioners reproduce detrimental dynamics and generate negative results, as they often receive vague instructions from superiors, use information that is misrepresented or lost through intermediaries, do not speak local languages or lack cultural knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁰ Autesserre compellingly traces how peacebuilding processes relentlessly deviate from the well-intended aspirations of practitioners or from the principles professed before practice.Footnote ⁶¹ She observes how in situations of adventure and risk, when deviations and complications occur, practitioners tend to rely on foreign expertise and seek security on a fixed moral compass – as Dewey warned repetitively not to do.Footnote ⁶² Instead, she suggests an enduring and erratic peace process that involves a diverse array of local and international actors in a dynamic exchange of ideas, experiences, and resources.Footnote ⁶³ In other words, to paraphrase Dewey, rather than directed towards eternal truths and principles, peacebuilding should be concerned with a world that is both unfinished and unclear.Footnote ⁶⁴

Practicing a pragmatist approach? The eclipse of liberal peace

The pragmatist critique of liberal peacebuilding, which highlights the complexity of everyday experiences that resist organisational plans, guidelines, and structures, is opening up alternative ways of undertaking peace missions. In the past years, peacebuilding policy practice has experienced a shift away from the previous concerns with addressing the causal factors of the conflict. Even when sometimes reports make explicit reference to addressing the ‘root causes’ of conflict, actions on the ground tend to focus on ‘the management of local volatilities’, gradually forsaking statebuilding projects and structural readjustments.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a Security Council Meeting of March 2018, deliberating on how to improve the UN peacekeeping operations, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UNSG) António Guterres counselled refraining from ‘creating unrealistic expectations’: ‘I urge the Security Council members to sharpen and streamline mandates and put an end to mandates that look like Christmas trees. Christmas is over … By attempting too much, we dilute our efforts and weaken our impact.’Footnote ⁶⁶

In order to tone expectations down, the time horizon of peace missions must necessarily expand. As Ban Ki Moon claimed: ‘political processes and institution-building require sustained and long-term international political, financial and technical support’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the last few years, field operations tend to last an average of three times longer than before, and the trend is continuing, as ‘hurried’ processes and ‘impracticable timelines’ are seen to produce unstable outcomes, reaffirming war tensions and excluding ‘dialogue at the grassroots, on the ground, in the provinces’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Building on the benefits of ethnographic field research, the assumption is that short-term interventions do not work and that time offers the opportunity for always more contacts, meetings, and observations; more accuracy, context, and depth in the analyses; more likelihood of serendipitous discoveries and witnessing the evolution of events.Footnote ⁶⁹ Whereas the UN bears the transition to a ‘sustaining peace’ where conflict prevention mingles with peacekeeping and peace consolidation, the EU proposes an ‘integrated approach to conflict and crisis’, to intervene uninterruptedly and for indefinite periods of time: ‘The EU will act at all stages of the conflict cycle, acting promptly on prevention, responding responsibly and decisively to crises, investing in stabilisation, and avoiding premature disengagement when a new crisis erupts.’Footnote ⁷⁰ The prolongation of external support – intervening long before the conflict has broken out and deferring the final end point – brings proximity, leeway, and openness to opportunities along the way, while averting the anguish of tight deadlines.Footnote ⁷¹

The idea of long-term engagement often pops up intertwined with the idea of the need for engaging at the community level to gain knowledge devoid of stereotypes and facilitate truly locally owned processes.Footnote ⁷² The truism is that, rather than exporting Western-based policy prescriptions that incapacitate bottom-up responses, one must rely on indigenous knowledge, their dynamic learnings, interpretations, and experiences, and strengthen context-sensitive strategies that are led predominantly by a variety of local agents.Footnote ⁷³ As one UN report sums up: ‘peace cannot be imposed from the outside’ but ‘needs to emerge organically from within society’.Footnote ⁷⁴ International agencies, or so their reports state, redouble efforts to further local engagement, beyond the mere rhetoric of national and local ownership.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although it seems that there are always more places to access and new voices to listen to, policies constantly restrict external influence and dominance, while attempting to empower diverse local communities – from indigenous minorities to women and youth.Footnote ⁷⁶

By downgrading expectations and giving up models, by lengthening operations and transferring responsibilities to local actors, peacebuilders have finally ‘landed’ at a place where a new pragmatist orientation may begin.Footnote ⁷⁷ Instead of applying what is known already or setting goals before hand, as if ideals could still be held up to the sky and spread universally, interventions increasingly insist on actors sharing knowledge in situ and in emphasising the importance of learning by doing, taking up the consequences of on-the-ground practices. Dewey explains it this way:

The lack of certainty in postconflict contexts obliges practitioners to guess and experiment to generate provisional insights that are worth considering, despite oversights and errors.Footnote ⁷⁹ The idea of ‘doing no harm’ is a recurring one in policy documents and it demands cautiousness in order to minimise the risks and adverse consequences that policies may generate.Footnote ⁸⁰ Sometimes errors and failures become assets, rather than drawbacks.Footnote ⁸¹ Practitioners facilitate multiple grassroots initiatives and adapt to the results and consequences these may bring; rectify, improvise, invent, and try anew, watching for coming blessings or difficulties.Footnote ⁸²

David Chandler's work on resilience is useful to comprehend how approaches to international intervention draw on pragmatism to redefine policy strategies away from the liberal peace. In a world understood to be complex, resilience approaches avert the risk that either external agencies or local actors control peacebuilding processes by the means of operating their ideas and programmes hierarchically.Footnote ⁸³ Instead, these approaches focus on the everyday practices and the already existing resources and capabilities that exist in postconflict zones: ‘Pragmatist approaches of resilience seek to overcome this problematic and hierarchical binary by removing the “external” nature of international policy actors, as the focus upon the practices of the “everyday” is understood to generate the policy goals of intervention through community development itself.’Footnote ⁸⁴

It is often the case that practitioners pay lip service to pragmatist forms of peacebuilding, as critical scholars remind.Footnote ⁸⁵ In difficult situations of having to ‘fumble in the dark’, as Autesserre argues, peacebuilders are inclined to rely on expert knowledge, simple narratives and international sources, and to design short-term and top-down strategies.Footnote ⁸⁶ Two critiques of current operations in the Balkans serve as examples. Selver Sahin has observed how foreign agencies in Kosovo have favoured ‘stability first’ policies and kept executive powers in security matters, despite commitment to local ownership, thereby postponing the government's aspiration to create a regular army;Footnote ⁸⁷ in Bosnia, donors find it difficult to give up on their presumed ideas of ethnicity (assuming the existence of mono-ethnic groups), disregarding ‘the ambiguous ethnicness’ of local actors, which might be conducive to peace.Footnote ⁸⁸ Thus, differences can be easily detected between theoretically informed hybrid peace aspirations and current programmes and policies that are generally conditioned by everyday constraints, geostrategic pressures, and implemented in response to specific problems. In consequence, the literature tends to dismiss policy approaches that deny evolving narratives and practices, for donors seem to relentlessly carry a baggage of ‘liberal’ ideas and are determined to impose an agenda for peace.Footnote ⁸⁹ Contradicting Latour's famous remark, critics assert that ‘practitioners have never ceased to be modern’. While this is often true, the contribution made in this article is different.

In sum, so far the article has claimed that dominant understandings of peacebuilding are beginning to undertake a ‘pragmatist turn’, where a liberal normative agenda that could drive the intervention process is purposely abandoned. The original idea of liberal statebuilding – like democracy and the public for Dewey – appears increasingly ‘lost’, ‘uncertain’, and ‘eclipsed’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In consequence, peacebuilding processes must necessarily become ‘much more’ than ‘the product of an idea, of a single and consistent intent’.Footnote ⁹¹ Today, a pragmatist ethos permeates peacebuilding when hybridised norms, networks, institutions, and actors cooperate and partner, exploring ways of crafting stability and change from below. Or, to use Dewey's words again, when actors take the ‘indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behaviour’, finding ‘a common interest in controlling these consequences’.Footnote ⁹²

Reading current peacebuilding practices through a pragmatist lens is useful in order to expound two considerations, explored in the remaining parts of the article: first, to comprehend the sense of despair and scepticism that haunts most contemporary peacebuilding practices and second, to begin to grapple with the unforeseen consequences that current operations may bring. In other words, it responds to why is it that frustration looms over peacebuilders that support bottom-up initiatives? And where is a practice-based understanding of sustaining peace is heading? Current engagements in the Western Balkans are key to thinking through these questions, as recent evaluations highlight the need for a more processual, long-term, and practice-driven cooperation, while at the same time anticipate fatigue and a slow progress in the coming years.Footnote ⁹³ Although the interviews with practitioners cannot be used for a complete assessment of the perceptions on sustaining peace, they are valuable to investigate the apparent stasis and frustrations that accompany current practices in Bosnia and Kosovo and reflect on how these can be managed.

Following the consequences: The frustrating quest for peace in the Balkans

Postwar interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo have dominated policy and academic debates in the last two decades. After the wars in the 1990s, the UN led two ambitious and highly interventionist projects of postwar recovery and statebuilding. In Bosnia, this invasive approach caused a culture of dependency and proved detrimental to local reconciliation,Footnote ⁹⁴ motivating the gradual introduction of light footprint mechanisms that emphasised local ownership and societal development. For example, in Bosnia, the Bonn powers, which authorised almost unlimited control to the UN Secretariat in 1997, were nuanced throughout the 2000s by stressing the growth of civil society, while preparing the country for the EU accessionFootnote ⁹⁵

In Kosovo, similarly, the strong interventionist strategy adopted by the UN after the conflict (1998–9) has been tempered over the years to underscore the need for a bottom-up inclusive peace.Footnote ⁹⁶ In 2008, the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) supplanted the UN Mission, proposing a much more technical and less intrusive approach based on monitoring, mentoring, and advising, promoting inclusivity while de-emphasising ethnicity, gradually yielding the driving seat to local actors.Footnote ⁹⁷ In both countries, the shifts towards greater local autonomy of the peace process have not led to external withdrawal and the UN and EU have continuously prolonged their mandates and peacebuilding support activities. Even today, according to policy reports, there are many socioeconomic and political challenges lying ahead – from improving inter-ethnic coexistence or protection of minority rights to developing efficient financial institutions – and the role provided by foreign agencies is still considered vital.Footnote ⁹⁸ In May 2019, opining about Bosnia's application for EU membership, the Commission stated that Bosnia ‘does not yet sufficiently fulfil the criteria related to the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In consequence, ‘the Commission will monitor Bosnia and Herzegovina's progress within the institutional framework of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement and will continue financially supporting the country under the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Whereas EU officials in Brussels reduce all difficulties to a technical process that will be ‘fixed’ as soon as local partners cooperate (Interviews 8 and 9),Footnote ¹⁰¹ when travelling to these two countries today, one senses a growing despair among international peacebuilders. They are convinced that they should intervene less but stay longer; that they should offer recommendations and facilitate peace and, simultaneously, let local actors lead the way. For example, a chief diplomat of EULEX admitted without demur the errors committed in the early days of the UN-led international supervision in Kosovo: ‘We, Western institutions, thought we were right. We arrived with a clear package and wanted to impose peace’ (Interview 2). EULEX has learnt from this mistake, she continues, and has introduced local ownership in all institution-building mechanisms since the beginning of the mission in 2008. Yet she considers that EULEX has still too much authority, too much responsibility: ‘What is the added value of having an executive mandate?’ Too much power for EULEX, reasons the official, implies that local authorities blame the foreign mission for any setback and shy away from making courageous decisions.

However, while seeming to call for retreat, the policymaker bemoans the reduction of EULEX staffing from 1,600 to 800 in 2016. She foresees duties and chores for EULEX everywhere, as ‘Kosovars are not ripe to deal with the issues by themselves’ (Interview 2). As an example, she explains that some judges decline to be in charge of certain cases because it is too dangerous for them. Albeit there have been substantial advances in the creation of a judicial system, it is still immature. The current mandate of EULEX ends on 14 June 2020, but the diplomat intimates that the EU should continue advising, nurturing, and strengthening Kosovar institutions in the future.

The impetus to admit the negative impacts and pitfalls of international agencies and yet to opt to prolong the international engagement is not seen as contradictory. In June 2018, the Council of the EU decided to refocus the mandate of EULEX and ended the judicial executive part of the mission, while two months later it launched Justice 2020, an initiative to ‘maintain an extensive monitoring capability in both the Kosovo judicial and prosecutorial systems as well as in the correctional service’.Footnote ¹⁰² The EULEX Head of Mission, Alexandra Papadopoulou, explains that the initiative is requested rather than forced: ‘Justice 2020 is a mechanism that was established proactively at the initiative of the Kosovo authorities. This is a very relevant aspect worth emphasising, because real change can only be achieved and sustained through local ownership.’ Yet, it is an ownership that is shared: ‘As long as it will remain in Kosovo – EULEX stands ready to provide its subject matter expert advice and its uniquely embedded perspective in many rule of law areas … [EULEX will] continue advising Kosovo counterparts in overcoming their challenges, including any issues that Justice 2020 may identify over time.’Footnote ¹⁰³

Most relevant policy frameworks in the Balkans today note that external presence is ‘invited’ to stay or ‘welcomed’ to assist and centred on giving more responsibilities to local contractors, institutions, and people, while at the same time emphasizing the need for a continued process of intervention.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These reports invariably conclude that ‘additional steps are needed regarding enforcement’ of human and fundamental rights;Footnote ¹⁰⁵ or ‘much work remains before the judicial institutions in northern Kosovo become fully functional’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Although local autonomy is a priority, external actors always find their niche: ‘the time has now come for them to demonstrate their capacities and capabilities as fully independent institutions. In the meantime, the EU remains available to continue its support through a number of available instruments.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In Bosnia, according to the 2018 progress report, almost all areas – from public administration to the fight against corruption, from gender-based violence to migration management capacity – are yet to be improved.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ And a degree of interference sustained across time is always implied: ‘Local actors are more exposed to dangers than Americans … There are always exceptions to the principle of ownership. We need to choose well when to interfere’, argues an official from USAID (Interview 5). As there are unforeseen circumstances and policies and initiatives generate unexpected consequences, a yawning abyss between theory and practice, as deep as the Mariana Trench, always returns and keeps foreign practitioners occupied.

A director of the OSCE in Bosnia regrets the negative consequences generated by the policy of ‘two schools under one roof’ promoted in the aftermath of the war (Interview #4). Since violence had separated communities across ethnic and religious lines, the OSCE sought to implement a policy of bringing children together in the school (one roof), although they would be separated and learn in two languages, two histories, and have two curricula, two classrooms, two entrances, and different educators (two schools). This initial plan, the official argues, was legitimised to avoid an unsecure teaching environment; it was only a first step to later integrate the students under one curriculum, one school, meeting the broader aim of cultivating a tolerant, reconciled, and multi-ethnic society (Interview 4). But the policy did not carry the intended results and the division in the educational system has legitimised ethno-nationalist rhetoric, strengthened confrontation and entrenched ethnic division.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Two decades after the war, some schools have been integrated, while others remain segregated.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The director explains that the OSCE cannot and does not want to alter the education system, overriding cantonal competencies. The responsibility of external agencies must be different: ‘We need to give attention to the right stories’, she expresses (Interview 4). Organic and grassroots initiatives for peace certainly exist, like the children protesting against segregation in the schooling system of Jajce, a town located a two-and-a-half-hour drive northwest from Sarajevo.Footnote ¹¹¹ ‘These children deserve an empire’, she claims, and explains that they had to rebel against the authorities of the Central Bosnia Canton, their parents, the school director, and some of their teachers to fight for an inclusive education. ‘Our role is to recognise and support their courage to fight for a better society’ (Interview 4). In July 2018, the OSCE and the Dutch Foreign Ministry granted the Max van der Stoel Award to the children for their promotion of societal integration.Footnote ¹¹² However, ‘stories like this are too few’, the official confesses. Her hope is that the children of Jajce will influence other children; that these stories become the norm, so that OSCE can nurture them.

Similarly, the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) has drawn on EU funds to develop the ‘ordinary heroes peacebuilding program’, running from 2011, which shows audiovisual material of local stories of reconciliation to youth participants across Bosnia. ‘We do not force anything’, explains a team member of PCRC, ‘we only encourage [communities] to reflect on perceptions or stereotypes of war by projecting their individual stories of cooperation and peace’ (Interview 7). Yet, she underscores, while young people are usually receptive to reconciliation stories, one can still perceive deep divisions in society. As in the interview with the OSCE official, the unspoken subtext here is that foreign practitioners are looking for needles in haystacks, for lighthouses in an ocean of obscurity.

Officials working for international organisations recognise that they can achieve little and should not impose their will, but lament that national actors do not always pursue the right objectives. Despite the acceptance in policy circles that sustaining peace requires that international and local agents are engaged relationally in everyday practices, in such ways that consequences, feedback loops, deflections, surprises, contingencies, and errors are taken into account,Footnote ¹¹³ the perils of practical affairs deter them from doing so. In sum, a far cry from liberal peace, international agencies are conscious that their policies deviate from initial expectations and need to follow and support existing dynamics and actions, rather than try to change them. However, not yet like pragmatism, they often remain steadfast in their original objectives of bringing about an inclusive peace. Speaking about education and democracy, Dewey writes:

According to Dewey, the ends must not be rigid, but flexible. Quite to the contrary, peacebuilders resist this openness with regard to their aims. Since neither they nor local actors can meet them, despair takes hold.

While liberal peace practitioners used to affirm their moral superiority, today's boast about their humbleness. As a USAID official in Kosovo declares: ‘we take real pride in calling ourselves a learning institution’ (Interview 1). After two decades of thorough supervision, agencies like USAID no longer work with ‘specific templates’ fixed a priori. Instead, as the official explains: ‘Learning and adapting, are the two words that appear on every single page of our regulations and policies.’ Experience guides policies and these are constantly revised and ‘changed to meet the new circumstances’ (Interview 1). The interviewee describes a non-linear process of unpredictable turns in which they must be flexible and continuously learn: ‘we need to recognise failure, we need to embrace failure, because if you do not fail, you do not learn’ (Interview 1).

Yet the same official recounts that Kosovar institutions are still weak. ‘They lack capacity’, she argues, because some are too new, others suffer from corruption (Interview 1). She admits to feel ‘discouraged’ when the people do not seem to want to improve their lives: ‘I would love to see 10,000 people marching in central Pristina against corruption. But this does not happen’ (Interview #1). The USAID official has a clear vision, like the metaphysician philosophers despised by Dewey: she knows the problem – corruption – and the solution – committed and responsible people. She uses a metaphor to emphasise the lack of local will: ‘you can drive a horse to the water. But you cannot make him drink’ (Interview 1). How does she know whether the water is potable, whether the horse is thirsty? Deweyan questions could certainly undermine the USAID official's framing of external assistance. The USAID official is not contradicting herself when she seems to trust local counterparts and dismiss them at the same time. She is articulating the fundamental problem of trying to shun liberal peace, while still setting goals for peacebuilding and wanting to fix certain obstacles and direct the events: they wish to control ‘the public’, as if it was fixed and organised, rather than the ‘indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behaviour’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ That is, on the one hand, the USAID official knows that, in order to construct a stable and prospering state, international agents need to take a secondary role, assume responsibility for some of the faults, delve into everyday concerns and rely on locally driven projects. On the other hand, she appears discouraged, as local actors do not act as she wishes that they might. She feels disheartened, as reality contradicts her expectations.

The key source of practitioners’ frustration lies in the aspiration to reconcile pragmatist and liberal stances: there is a loss of confidence in international and local peacebuilders and a commitment to working together through the concreteness of everyday practices; at the same time, however, practitioners still desire to progress and achieve peace. Norms like ‘liberal peace’ or European standards are still given a higher value, while complex everyday practices and experiences are depreciated. As Dewey explains: ‘the happiness attending knowing is unalloyed; it is not entangled in the risks which overt action cannot escape … Failure and frustration are attributed to the accidents of an alien, intractable and inferior realm of existence.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the twilight of the liberal peace, pragmatism helps to visualise how peacebuilding enters into a difficult impasse. Everywhere there is a predisposition to prolong interventions and allow greater context-sensitivity, to transfer ownership and include diverse local practitioners, to be aware of the consequences of initiatives and avoid doing harm. Yet in holding certain normative aspirations – in aiming at building peace in a certain way, or privileging reconciliation, stability, and liberal democracy – the unpredictable, labyrinthine path of emerging deviations appears exasperating. As we have seen, the call within policy circles as much as in critical scholarship is to multiply the efforts, show greater reflexivity, stay longer, and be even more sensitive to alterity, to finally close the gap between theory and practice.

In the field, frustration fills the air because the gap will not be closed, because practitioners have not made ‘a surrender’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Frustration was never an issue for the pragmatists, who accepted errors, mishaps, and deflections as part of a neverending quest for certainties. Dewey did not want to simply ‘turn things upside down’ and embrace perils and accidents, but to acknowledge the value of practices in generating new ideas and horizons. Thus, for pragmatism the point is not only that engagements in everyday life are necessarily different to our theoretical norms and values, but to embolden practitioners to face up to the challenge of privileging their practice, while recognising that ‘doing is always subject to peril, to the danger of frustration’ and that practices can never bring ‘absolute certitude’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In turn, this would imply to think sustaining peace without an original principle and an end point. This would be akin to reinterpretations in the humanities of how to live in the Anthropocene, that is, understanding ‘life’ open-endedly, ‘without teleology, without purpose, without a final accomplishment’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Is it then perhaps time to drop peace and move forward without attachments and anxiety? The profusion of sustaining peace practices may be small steps towards this new pragmatist adventure, although our theories and critical perspectives of peacebuilding have not yet recognised it.