ABSTRACT

It has been established that public discourses of peacebuilding are challenged by hidden discourses and practices of international technocracy, elite patron-client relations, and subordinate conflict avoidance and even radical dissent. In this sense, peacebuilding can be understood intertextually: a process which emerges in the relations amongst discursively constituted subjects and between their public and hidden transcripts. Authority is performed in the public spaces of politico-administrative spaces and sovereignty is simulated at the site of the border of regional and international communities. Performances of authority and simulacra of sovereignty are productive in a negative sense, in that they delegitimise alternative modes of governance and intervention. However, public discursive formations, in their performative and simulative functions, do not create widespread order beyond their national, regional and international sites and moments such as those explored in Chapters 5 and 6 (the higher offices of state, the state border, international conferences and seminars, parliamentary elections). As modes of governance they are contingent on the vagaries of everyday subsistence and economic life. It is this contingency – the continuing differentiation of subordinate, elite and international spaces and the moments of discursive mediation between them – which is the first concern of this chapter.