Concrete approaches to peace

Infrastructure as Peacebuilding

Bibliographic Data

ID3694091
AuthorsJan Bachmann (0000-0001-9276-0442, Danish Institute for International Studies), Peer Schouten (0000-0001-7453-6463)
Year2018
Volume94
Issue2
Pages381-398
Publication date2018-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-5850 • E-ISSN: 1468-2346
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ia/iix237
OpenAlexW2790916041
LanguageEN
Citations received43

Do roads literally lead to peace? While seemingly a strange question to ask, today's peacebuilders certainly seem to think so. After decades of focus on questions of governance, today, instead, infrastructure primes in state- and peacebuilding missions in many fragile and conflict-affected societies. Peacebuilding efforts in places ranging from Somalia to Afghanistan to the Congo are, to a considerable extent, interventions in the built environment. While infrastructure has always been around in post-conflict reconstruction, today, infrastructure is mobilized during ongoing conflict, invested with aspirations of improving security and stability. To be sure, infrastructure played a big role in the formation of strong western states. But can we take this experience to try and forge political orders of concrete and steel? At a first glance, a theory of change that reorders societies by deploying the hidden powers of the built environment seems compelling, and measurable and concrete infrastructure outputs, additionally, fit perfectly within today's more pragmatic approaches to peace. However, based on examples from across the contemporary global peacebuilding landscape, we show that infrastructure neither amounts to a uniform force, nor is it clear what its impact on peace exactly is. What is certain is that infrastructure is profoundly entwined with contemporary peacebuilding, and that we therefore need to develop novel theoretical angles to come to terms with the ubiquitous politics of infrastructure.

Corporate governance · Economics · Law and economics · Management · Peacebuilding · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Public Administration