ABSTRACT
Professor David Chandler, Centre for the Study of Democracy and Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster
This chapter seeks to explore how traditional understandings of ‘competing knowledges’ in conflict and post-conflict situations are being increasingly sidelined by ontologies of emergence. In ‘emergence’ frameworks, there is no such thing as ‘conflict knowledge’, as a discrete form of expertise. These pragmatic approaches see attempts to grasp conflict in terms of cultural or socio-political representations as reductionist, positing idealised and abstract understandings of causation, rather than focusing on seeing and responding to manifestations or appearances on the ground. In discourses of ‘emergence’ the production of knowledge is increasingly distributed in flatter and more ‘real-time’ approaches, which seek to capture and enable ‘organic’ processes rather than to understand conflict in either classical rationalist terms or inter-subjective knowledge claims. Frameworks of emergence focus less upon conflict as a discrete problem and more as a process that can be intervened in without the construction of a distinct or separate field of expertise. In these approaches the problem is no longer that of intervening in deterministic social processes which assume underlying ‘problems’ but of responding in real-time to ensure that conflict as emergence can be coped with or managed rather than known, understood or resolved.
