On Afghan footbaths and sacred cows in Kosovo: urban legends of interventionстатья из журнала
Аннотация: AbstractDrawing on ideas of the narrative turn in social and cultural studies, this article explores the oral, informal side of communication in contexts of international peacebuilding interventions. It takes urban legends – entertaining stories about events that supposedly happened to ‘a friend of a friend’ and usually contain a moral – as a methodological access road to the study of meta-narratives that underpin interveners' understandings of themselves and the intervention context. Three categories of urban legends/meta-narratives are discussed: legends about ‘the intervened’ whose common thread is barbarianism; legends about ‘the interveners’ which revolve around a meta-narrative of Western/Northern hubris; and legends about intercultural interactions which reproduce a meta-narrative of cultural misunderstandings and intervention failure. Using Scott's idea of public and hidden transcripts, we discuss possible functions of such narrations in the context of interventions.Keywords:: interventionpeacebuildingstatebuildingnarrativeurban legendanecdotestorytellingcommunication AcknowledgementsWe would like to extend our gratitude to Michael Bölke of Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg for setting up and maintaining our website. We also owe thanks to Leonard M. Fritz and Sven Gehle for their valuable assistance in transcribing our recordings of urban legends. Jesper Nielsen helped with the final version of this article. We would also like to highlight the support of ISA, where at 2011's Annual Convention in Montreal we were invited to organise an Innovative Panel; Andrea Talentino, Susanna Campbell, Morten Bøas, Oliver Richmond and Dejan Guzina participated and shared legends and ideas. We were invited to present at Manchester University in 2010, at the conference ‘Conflict, Intervention and the Politics of Knowledge’. Also, discussions at Queen's University, Kingston/ON in 2011, Bremen's BIGSSS-InIIS Colloquium and Munich's Technical University in 2012 helped shape the argument. We would like to extend gratitude to all who commented on the approach, including the anonymous reviewers. Last but not least, many thanks to all those who have provided us with research material in form of urban legends. If you have any stories of interest for our project, please send them to Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (beb14@aber.ac.uk) or Florian P. Kühn (florian.kuehn@sowi.hu-berlin.de), or hand them in by using the form on our project website site (www.legends-of-intervention.com/mystory).Notes 1Source: story provided by Séverine Autesserre, Columbia University, based on a confidential interview with a Sudanese journalist in Juba, April 2011. She heard similar stories involving different players, e.g. Médecins Sans Frontières, and a different use for the condoms, e.g. to carry water or homemade alcohol. 2 We use the most common English term for such anecdotes, despite a lively debate about whether the adjective ‘urban’ is useful to describe these types of stories, which are neither told nor take place exclusively in urban settings. 3 Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 10. 4 For different narrating performances depending on whether the legend is believed or not see Gillian Bennett, ‘Legend: Performance and Truth’, in Monsters with Iron Teeth: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend Vol. III, ed. Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988), 13–36. 5 Jan Harold Brunvand, Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). 6 See http://www.legends-of-intervention.com. 7 Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, xi. 8 E.g. GTZ, Wirkungen zielgerichtet kommunizieren: Storytelling für die Außendarstellung (Eschborn: Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, 2009). 9 Ingo Schneider, ‘Über das multidisziplinäre Erzählen und die Vielfalt der Erzähltheorien’, in Erzählkultur: Beiträge zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Erzählforschung, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 3–14.10 Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas and Don D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 129–34.11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), ch. 5; Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 213–39; Watzlawick et al., Pragmatics, 259–71.12 Schapp 1976 quoted in Albrecht Lehmann, ‘Homo narrans – Individuelle und kollektive Dimensionen des Erzählens’, in Brednich, Erzählkultur, 59–70, at p. 63.13 John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature (New York: Garland, 1998), 3.14 Morten Bøås, ‘Uganda in the Regional War Zone: Meta-Narratives, Pasts and Presents’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 23, no. 3 (2004): 283–303, quote at p. 284.15 Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, 4.16 Bøås, ‘Uganda’, 284.17 Jean-Francois Lyotard, for example, points to the constitutive effects of meta-theories for the truth claims of theories; analogously basic meta-narratives determine form and functions of narratives. Lyotard, Das postmoderne Wissen: Ein Bericht (Graz: Böhlau, 1986), 87–111.18 Lehmann, ‘Homo narrans’, 66.19 Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, ‘Rumor, Gossip and Urban Legends’, Diogenes no. 213 (2007): 19–35, quote at p. 28; cf. also Ronald L. Baker, ‘The Influence of Mass Culture on Modern Legends’, Southern Folklore Quarterly 40 (1976): 367–76.20 DiFonzo and Bordia, ‘Rumor, Gossip and Urban Legends’, 28–9.21 Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Die Spinne in der Yucca-Palme (München: C.H. Beck, 2007), 13–19; and Gillian Bennett, ‘What's “Modern” about the Modern Legend?’, Fabula 26 (1985): 219–29.22 Gary Alan Fine, ‘The City as a Folklore Generator: Legends in the Metropolis’, Urban Resources 4, no. 3 (1987): 3–6, quote at p. 3.23 Brunvand, Too Good to Be True, 19. This is what makes them attractive for newspapers and other news outlets, despite urban legends' quality as oral genre. Brunvand, who also highlights the role of the internet for disseminating parody urban legends (ibid., 473–4), and Brednich have shown that urban legends often find their way into newspapers and other formal media, thereby being ‘ennobled’ as part of formal, reliable information. Brednich points to surveys according to which 18% of respondents claimed to have read urban legends in papers, while 7% had heard them on radio or TV. We can thus assume that urban legends are sometimes transferred from the oral, informal to the written, formal realm, thereby contributing to formal knowledge production. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Pinguine in Rückenlage: Brandneue sagenhafte Geschichten von heute (München: C.H. Beck, 2004), 10.24 Monte Gulzow and Carol Mitchell, ‘“Vagina Dentata” and “Incurable Venereal Disease”: Legends from the Viet Nam War’, Western Folklore 39 (1980): 306–16.25 For a discussion cf. Daniel R. Barnes, ‘Interpreting Urban Legends’, Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 40 (1984): 67–78.26 Despite accounts to the contrary, which list lack of documentation as an important source for inefficient, unsustainable projects run by intervention agencies; this, however, is usually used to describe aberrant practices and exceptions to the rule – in any way, they reify that formality ought to be the guiding norm. Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, Winning Hearts and Minds? Examining the Relationship between Aid and Security in Afghanistan (Medford, MA: Feinstein International Center, 2011), 47–50.27 Alex Veit and Klaus Schlichte, ‘Three Arenas: The Conflictive Logics of External Statebuilding’, in Statebuilding and State-Formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention, ed. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara (London: Routledge, 2012), 167–81.28 Ibid., 174.29Source: story collected by Florian Kühn, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, based on interviews with German military personnel, Kabul, May 2006.30Source: story documented from personal conversation by Florian Kühn with a project coordinator at the German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), approx. 2008.31Source: story provided by Marta Iñiguez de Heredia, London School of Economics, based on an interview with a diplomat on his impressions of the UN Mission in Congo, Goma, July 2009.32 Story provided by Hannah Neumann, Coordinator/Researcher of the International Research Network Cultures of Intervention (CoINet), Berlin 2011.33 Interviews (Florian Kühn) with military personnel, Kabul, May 2006. A similar bottom line was conveyed by an account of a German police project leader, who traced back desertions to the unfamiliar luxury that Afghan police cadets experience at German training facilities in Afghanistan: ‘When these guys [e.g. the cadets] come to our place, it is the first time in their lives that they sleep in proper beds. We often found the plumbing to be blocked by stones. That is because these guys usually go to a field to ‘do their business’ and use a handful of stones to clean themselves. When they do that in a proper bathroom, they of course block the tubes. We usually had to teach them how to use toilet paper. Many of them deserted when later they were deployed to remote places where they found they had to live in holes rather than in the luxurious quarters of the training academy, as that wasn't what they had imagined’ (former leader of the German bilateral police project in Kabul; presentation held at Atlantic Academy spring academy, Lambrecht, 15 March 2012, collected by Florian Kühn).34 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1979); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Kevin C. Dunn, Imagining the Congo (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Séverine Autesserre, ‘Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on the Congo and Their Unintended Consequences’, International Organization 63, no. 2 (2012): 249–80; and Himadeep Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (London: Hurst, 2012).35 Literal transcript (extract) of Oliver Richmond's contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel ‘Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders’, International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, March 17, 2011.36 Linda Dégh, ‘The “Belief Legend” in Modern Society’, in American Folk Legend: A Symposium, ed. Wayland D. Hand (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 55–68.37 The other category surfacing in the stories we have collected so far, but which will not be discussed in this article, is local legends offering alternative explanations of the aims and agendas of international interventionism – most prominently among them peacekeeping as paid leisure, hidden economic agendas as drivers of peacebuilders and the idea that a country's women must be the reason for foreign (mostly male) peacekeepers to participate in interventions.38Source: Séverine Autessere, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84. Autesserre stresses the migratory nature of this legend: ‘Depending on whether I was in Kosovo, the Congo, or Afghanistan, I heard different versions of it applied to the World Bank, the United Nations (UN), or the International Monetary Fund […]’; ibid.39Source: literal transcript of a story reported by Vanessa Pupavac, University of Nottingham, recorded at the conference ‘Conflict, Intervention and the Politics of Knowledge’, hosted by the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, November 25–26, 2010.40Source: literal transcript (extract) of Oliver Richmond's contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel ‘Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders’, International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, March 17, 2011.41Source: story collected by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Aberystwyth University, based on interviews with German military personnel at the KFOR field camp in Prizren, Kosovo, June 2004.42 Cf., for example, Ben Ramalingam, ‘The Genesis of Aid (a Parody)’, February 28, 2012, http://aidontheedge.info/2012/02/28/the-genesis-of-aid/ (accessed March 4, 2012).43Source: story sent in by Hannah Neumann, Coordinator/Researcher of the International Research Network Cultures of Intervention (CoINet), Berlin.44 Literal transcript (extract) of Morten Bøås' contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel ‘Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders’, International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, March 17, 2011.45Source: story collected from personal communication with Hannah Neumann, Coordinator/Researcher of the International Research Network Cultures of Intervention (CoINet), Berlin.46Source: alternative version supplied by Florian Kühn, unrecorded source.47 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); and John D. Heathershaw, Post-Conflict Tajikistan: The Politics of Peacebuilding and the Emergence of Legitimate Order (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).48 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 45–69.49 Heathershaw, Post-Conflict Tajikistan, 52.50 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 21.51 Ibid., 11.52 Ibid., 18–19.53 Florian P. Kühn, Sicherheit und Entwicklung in der Weltgesellschaft: Liberales Paradigma und Statebuilding in Afghanistan (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2010); Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Florian P. Kühn, ‘The International Community – Rhetoric and Reality: Tracing a Seemingly Well-Known Apparition’, Sicherheit + Frieden (Security + Peace) 27, no. 2 (2009): 73–9; and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara und Florian P. Kühn, Illusion Statebuilding: Warum der westliche Staat so schwer zu exportieren ist (Hamburg: edition Körber-Stiftung, 2010).54 Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 185.55 Ibid.; and cf. Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn, Illusion Statebuilding.56 Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 115.57 Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); and Catherine Götze, ‘Sameness and Distinction: Understanding Democratic Peace in a Bourdieusian Perspective’, in Democratic Wars: Looking at the Dark Side of Democratic Peace, ed. Anna Geis, Lothar Brock and Harald Müller (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 170–91.58 Duffield, Development, 122 (emphasis in original).59 Organisational and policy myths are ‘a narrative created and believed by a group of people that diverts attention away from a puzzling part of their reality’. Dvora Yanow, ‘Silences in Public Policy Discourse: Organizational and Policy Myths’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 2, no. 4 (1992): 399–423, quote at p. 401. Defining myths as narrations refers to the language used: myths are ‘not propositions of logic or arguments of rhetoric’ (ibid.), but narrations meant to make sense when believed without further questioning. Myths are socially constructed and evolve as a public discourse in a particular setting and in ‘response to the needs of the moment’ (ibid.).60 Thomas Gebauer, ‘Zivil-militärische Zusammenarbeit: NGOs im Kontext der Militarisierung des Humanitären’, in Afghanistan: Ein Krieg in der Sackgasse, ed. Johannes M. Becker and Herbert Wulf (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010), 145–60.61 On the role of performances in peacekeeping interventions see Paul Higate and Marsha Henry, Insecure Spaces. Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia (London: Zed Books, 2009).62 Heathershaw, Post-Conflict Tajikistan, 52.63 Klaus Schlichte and Alex Veit, Coupled Arenas: Why State-Building Is So Difficult, Working Papers Micropolitics no. 3/2007, Berlin: Humboldt University, 24; and Alex Veit, Intervention as Indirect Rule: Civil War and Statebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010).64 Duffield, Development, 188.65 Veit and Schlichte, ‘Three Arenas’, 172–5.66 Severine Autesserre, Peaceland. Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapter 5; Lisa Smirl, ‘Building the Other, Constructing Ourselves: Spatial Dimensions of International Humanitarian Response’, International Political Sociology 2, no. 3 (2008): 236–53; and Lisa Smirl, ‘The State We Are(n't) in: Liminal Subjectivity in Aid Worker Auto-Biographies’, in Bliesemann de Guevara, Statebuilding and State-Formation, 230–45.67 Catherine Goetze and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, ‘The “Statebuilding Habitus”: International Civil Servants in Kosovo’, in Bliesemann de Guevara, Statebuilding and State-Formation, 198–213; and Catherine Goetze and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of Peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies 40, no. 4 (2014): 771–802.68 Schlichte and Veit, Coupled Arenas, 21; see Pierre Clastres, Staatsfeinde: Studien zur politischen Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 13–23.69 Schlichte and Veit, Coupled Arenas, 21. A similar tendency can be observed among researchers.70 See, for example, Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).71 GTZ, Wirkungen. See also Florian P. Kühn, ‘The Peace Prefix: Ambiguities of the Word “Peace”’, International Peacekeeping 19, no. 4 (2012): 396–409, quote at p. 404.72 Cf. Maarten A. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 52–68.Additional informationNotes on contributorsBerit Bliesemann de GuevaraBerit Bliesemann de Guevara is Senior Lecturer in peacebuilding, post-war reconstruction and transitional justice at Aberystwyth University, Wales. For her research on the effects of international statebuilding on state authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina she was awarded the German Studies Award 2009. She is author/editor of several books and special issues on violent conflict, international interventions and questions of knowledge production, among them ‘Knowledge in Conflict: The International Crisis Group’ (Third World Quarterly 4 (2014)), Statebuilding and State-Formation: The Political Sociology of Intervention (Routledge, 2012) and A Micro-Sociology of Violence (Routledge, 2012).Florian P. KühnFlorian P. Kühn is Interim Professor for International Politics at Humboldt University, Berlin. He teaches International Relations and international security, political economy and the ideational mind-sets guiding international and translocal political engagement. His book on the security–development nexus, Security and Development in World Society, and how it informs the international intervention in Afghanistan, won the German Middle East Studies Association's PhD-award in 2010. He has co-edited several journal special issues on the violence of contemporary peace (International Peacekeeping 4 (2012)), on risk in IR (International Relations 3 (2011)) and on the so-called ‘International Community’ (Security and Peace 2 (2009)) and published widely on Afghanistan. Currently he is conducting a research project on risk policy and resilience of substate social figurations and another on ambiguity in peace processes. He is co-editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.
Год издания: 2014
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Источник: Peacebuilding
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