ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to draw out an understanding of the role of narratives and discourses of race, culture and civil society, within the paradigm of international statebuilding, through the location of the discourse of culture as a transitional stage between interventionist and regulatory discourses of race and civil society. It particularly seeks to highlight that the discourse of culture is key to understanding the post-liberal paradigm of international statebuilding intervention and policy regulation as it has become cohered over the last decade. This is all the more important as the discourse of culture has in many respects been displaced by the discourse of civil society. In drawing out the links between the framings of race, culture and civil society, this chapter seeks to explain how the discourse of civil society intervention has been reinvented on the basis of the moral divide established and cohered through the discourse of culture and how the discourse of civil society contains a strong apologetic content, capable of legitimizing and explaining the persistence of social and economic problems or political fragmentation while simultaneously offering statebuilding policy programmes on the basis of highly ambitious goals of social transformation.
