Conflict Resolution in War-Torn Societies?: Delineating the Post-Conflict State-Building Dispositif

Abstract

In our time, very much attention and intellectual effort are being directed to conflict-resolution activities in war-torn societies throughout the world. In this aspect, the centrality of the UN in terms of post-conflict reconstruction activities is notorious. Notoriously, state-building is a key enterprise in regard of addressing the international conflicts throughout the globe, being deployed as a key conflict-resolution tool applied globally. Although such activities are represented as mere techniques aiming to build peace, this peace is intimately associated with the institutionalization of liberal ideas in structuring realms such as the political, the economical and the social spheres. Here lays the objective of this paper. It aims, from a critical position, to discuss and deconstruct this UN model regarding the transformation of the international violent conflicts. Departing from Foucauldian concepts such as dispositif, government, discipline and biopolitics, it aims to critically analyze the post-conflict state-building practice. In a first moment, the paper delineates the conflict resolution mindset which state-building is commonly associated with and immersed. In a second moment, it seeks to (re)problematize the state-building practice as a post-conflict dispositif, rather than merely a conflict-resolution tool, and to interrogate whether (and how) this notion can be related with other Foucauldian concepts such as government, discipline and biopolitics.