ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by exploring the work of one scholar who has made a thorough attempt at comprehensive theorizing of an entire intervention: Severine Autesserre, with her study of the intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Investigating her approach in detail to see if it is applicable to other cases as well, it aims to assess her main analytical and theoretical tool, what she labels ‘the peacebuilding frame’, and discuss this concept of ‘frame’ and its supporting theoretical elements, ‘world polity’ and ‘organizational field’. The chapter proposes a deductive analytical framework which builds on certain of Autesserre’s elements, but is more generally applicable. Autesserre states that her term ‘frame’ builds on Erving Goffman’s 1974 work, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, and later refinements in political science. In Autesserre’s version, the concept of frames ‘focuses the analysis on how people organize knowledge and interpret it’.
