ABSTRACT
Peacebuilding practices are usually driven by the goal to make policy-related and practical recommendations regarding specific peacebuilding projects, and not to engage in systematic theory-building. Ideological and epistemological coherence has been promoted by the use of simplistic conflations, such as between peacebuilding and democratization, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The treatment of peacebuilding and statebuilding as synonymous further succeeded to entrench the connection between a particular type of international peace undergirded by the liberal state and economic liberalization. Drawing on the long history of dialectical relationship between theory and practice in feminist scholarship as well as the foundations of standpoint feminism, the author argues that the indivisibility offers useful pointers for conducting peacebuilding research from a critical perspective. Both feminist poststructuralism and postcolonial feminism employ the methodological and epistemological tools of discourse analysis to deconstruct reality, and to show how language and reality are often performatively co-constituted.
