‘Interjecting into spaces of the imperial core’ stabilizes categories of violence instead of deconstructing them. Merely unmasking hidden dynamics can’t change their durability because they are embedded in structures with inertia.

Critique-without-Alternative The first mode of critique in peace and conflict studies is critique-without-alternative. This approach has its origins in the early efforts within critical peace approaches to reveal the weaknesses of liberal peacebuilding and its rarely provided alternative solutions, which are often counterfactual to the solutions of mainstream peacebuilding theories and praxis. Critique-without-alternative has concentrated largely on “revealing the implicit political underpinnings of international peacebuilding, and [demonstrating] their flaws,” such as power imbalance, ideological inconsistency, and flawed sources of legitimacy (Tadjbakhsh 2011, 6; see also Paffenholz 2015). For the critique-without-alternative camp, critique is an endpoint, which often creates the impression that critiquing is done for the sake of critiquing. Their quest is to highlight the impossible and incomplete, and they in fact aspire to problem-shifting, thereby avoiding the need to propose alternatives. By not offering an alternative, they aim to see the current system fall under its own contractions. They do this by deconstructing the ethics and politics of political interventions, seeking more to find faults than solutions (Jackson 2015, 26). In other words, critique-without-alternative seeks to unmask power relations and dynamics of dominance and to create space for a politics of resistance. It is a type of critique that seeks “to politicize practices that have been profoundly depoliticized” (Walker 2002, 258). This approach draws its epistemological inspiration less from empirical observation than from political and philosophical theories. Scholars pursuing critique-without-alternative have been drawn away from generating practical and alternative solutions, fearing that they might be co-opted by state-led policy agendas (see Heathershaw 2008, 616–18). They have been strongly influenced by the work of other critical scholars and their normative alternatives on human security, humanitarian intervention, and responsibility to protect have been utilized by policy makers, not for advancing emancipatory interests but for disguising international interventions (see Browning and McDonald 2011, 244). Kurki (2013, 243) has argued that a “danger resides in . . . policy-driven engagement: the danger of feeding into the legitimacy of a specific policy area, simply through critique.” Many aspects of critique-without-alternative are exemplified in the influential work of Chandler (2006, 2010, 2013, 2017), who is known for systematically criticizing other critical peace theories while avoiding engaging with the question of alternativity. From the outset, Chandler (2017, 209, 9) defined peacebuilding “as an evolving set of problem-solving prescriptions,” which has resulted in blurring “the boundaries between peace and war and between sovereignty and intervention.” Chandler’s critique leans more toward deconstructive methods, which highlights the weaknesses of mainstream thinking, but intentionally avoids providing any alternative solution apart from implicitly favoring human agency and the political autonomy of the state as a form of political community. The closest Chandler (2013, 32) gets to articulating an alternative is to spell out ambiguously his favor for [[TABLE OMITTED]] material and social conditions behind both interventions and resistance to external peacebuilding efforts, which at some point takes on the connotation of “post-liberal governance.” Chandler (2010, 16) criticizes the critical scholars who provide alternatives for being uncritical about their “critique of liberalism in post-conflict societies” and for creating a consensus framing the problem of state-building and peacebuilding intervention as a “problem of the relationship between the liberal West and the non-liberal Other.” For him, the postliberal governance framework does not operate based on the principles of human rights, political legitimacy, and the social contract but instead it seeks, as he asserts, “to secure stability through balancing internal and external interests and concerns as matters of technical and administrative competences in the formulations of good governance” (Chandler 2010, 15). From this position, generating alternatives when international interventions fail is an attempt to make the responsibility for unwanted consequences disappear. Following the same logic of critique, Chandler (2013, 9) has recently moved on to debates on resilience, where he has argued that, in the context of international state building, resilience has emerged as an “apologia for the limits of international interventions” and as an attempt to evade responsibility for the outcomes of state-building interventions. He has found that, as a result of this shift, local capacities, vulnerabilities, and agencies have been the target of intervention and research: consequently, the field of intervention involves societal reengineering rather than regime change (Chandler 2013, 211). Moreover, Chandler (2013, 24–25, 32) has argued that the return to nonlinearity, together with the local and intersubjective understandings of practices, moves away from structuring economic and social relations, such as “market inequality” and “asymmetries of intervention.” He adds that “the non-linear discourses of local ‘hidden’ agency neither create the basis of any genuine understanding of the limits to liberal peace nor provide any emancipatory alternative” (Chandler 2013, 31). In addition, critiquewithout-alternative takes issue with the recent critical turn in peacebuilding studies, which seeks to achieve emancipation by using Western agencies, structures, and institutions as epistemological bases for studying conflict-affected societies (see Sabaratnam 2013). They claim that current emancipatory possibilities within peace and conflict studies assign the responsibility for materializing their security alternatives to dominant powers, which render change impotent (see Hynek and Chandler 2013, 50). Here, proponents of critique-without-alternative fear that emancipating individuals as subjects of security plays into the hands of ruling forces. The closest Chandler and other proponents of critique-without-alternative get to alternativity is highlighting—through negational dialectics—the absence of something, without elaborating its key features or indicating how such a possibility could be translated into practice (see also Hameiri 2010). Because critique-without-alternative avoids offering practical alternatives, it has turned debates on peacebuilding from a praxis to a discourse, which facilitates conceptual interrogation and problematization free from the messy nuances and incommensurability of practices and empirical facts (see Heathershaw 2008, 602). Yet in Chandler’s (2006, 2010, 2017) work, there are trace arguments in favor of a strong, autonomous state free from external intervention, which, surprisingly, are not problematized by other noncomplicit critical scholars. Another example of critique-without-alternative is the recent work by Catherine Goetze (2017), which offers an interpretative critique of peacebuilding by deconstructing actors, relations, and processes of peacebuilding using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus. Goetze (2017, 1) has argued that peacebuilding “exists because it has become for a sufficiently large number of people and institutions with sufficiently important authority an unquestioned way of political action in the world and, on a more individual level, a way of making a living.” Goetze’s (2017, 4) study intentionally avoided offering alternatives that considered questions relating to the efficiency and success of peacebuilding as problem solving alternatives which fail to “investigate the economic, social, and political conditions that make the unequal relationships between internationals and locals possible, relationships that sustain themselves over time.” This claim is similar to Chandler’s method of critique—indicating what is wrong with the existing system, and vaguely articulating power relations and socioeconomic conditions of inequality as the structural causes of failure, without exploring how to change or overcome such structural blockages. A typical feature of critique-without-alternative is epistemological escapism, which is also present in Goetze’s work: he admits that “this book is not about a better peace we could build, it does not conclude on any policy recommendations,” leaving it implicit for attentive readers to “draw out practical lessons from my analysis, in particular in the ways peacebuilding work is organizationally structured” (Goetze 2017, 14). Finally, the work of Mark Duffield (2001, 2007) on the security-development nexus represents a borderline example of critique-without-alternative: it offers a valuable critique of the merging of development and security, highlights the contradictions and fallacies of liberal peace and the entire humanitarian and development assistance industry, and points out the complicit role of Western states in reproducing insecurity and maintaining underdevelopment in conflict- and disaster-affected societies. Duffield, however—like other proponents of critique-without-alternative—missed the opportunity to capitalize on his critical observations and promote emancipatory alternatives in greater detail. Although Duffield’s (2001) work on global governance and the new wars tracked down different political alternatives arising as a response to the networked character of liberal peace and the aid industry, he fell short of elaborating sufficiently on emancipatory alternatives for an inclusive global order embedded in cosmopolitan politics. Later on, Duffield (2007) made a compelling critique of development aid and its role in entrenching insecurities and creating uninsured subjects in turbulent societies but again fell short of teasing out further alternatives for building a solidarist global order that delivers aid to impoverished societies without expecting security, material gains, and political favors in return. Across the board, critique-without-alternative has deemed alternativity a form of intervention that plays into the hands of the existing global, regional, and local power holders. The major concern of critique-without-alternative is that if these power holders describe or prescribe what emancipatory peace might look like or how it might come about in reality, it could succumb to the instrumentalist logic of mainstream, interventionist epistemic and policy forces. This notwithstanding, it still does not resolve the primary question: how does critique for the sake of critique bring about social change? Critique-without-alternative has become a mode of delivering critique that is detached from social reality and imprisoned by the ontological recirculation of metatheoretical narratives (Duvall and Varadarajan 2003). The works of critical scholars that avoid alternativity are grounded to a considerable extent on imaginary and theoretical premises in which normative emancipatory empiricism does not feature greatly. Cynthia Weber (2017, 54) rightly argues that critical scholars in IR who tend to endorse antinormative knowledge risk making critique a dogmatic form of knowledge with moral certainty and a singular understanding of history, ideology, and political community. For Levine (2012), epistemic reification is one of the main fallacies of critical knowledge in IR. The quest for never-ending critique and antisolutionism evident among those subscribing to critique-without-alternative is gradually pushing critical peacebuilding debates toward metatheoretical and postempirical discussions. Ian Angus (2000, 258) has argued that discourse theories have lost touch with reality, as they regard discourses and language as disembodied representations of reality rather than a means for “understanding them as figuration of praxis.” In the context of peace and conflict studies, David Lewis (2017, 3) found that “the explicit or implicit reliance of many critics of liberal peace on a Foucauldian framework of discourse and knowledge is undermining the capacity to conceptualize and engage with the challenges of peace and conflict in a rapidly changing international order.” While it might be understandable why critique-without-alternative avoids offering practical solutions, its proponents miss the opportunity to perhaps capitalize on what Ulrich Beck (2015) referred to as emancipatory catastrophism, which holds that risks, disasters, and failures have hidden performative and emancipatory side effects that may produce positive common goods. Critique-without-alternative could benefit from this logic of inquiry without compromising its criticality. Yet it remains unfinished until it offers an emancipatory alternative—at either the conceptual, normative, or practical levels of inquiry. In essence, what this mode of criticality lacks is expanding the critique of power, security, and governmentality to also include non-Western societies that are affected by illiberal and authoritarian regimes, where the Eurocentric critical lens used to criticize liberal interventionism might no longer be relevant (see Lewis 2017). By constantly deconstructing liberal peace discourses and practices, critique-without-alternative has unintentionally contributed to the constitution of liberal peace as a unitary discursive framework, making it consistent in its inconsistency, timeless in its temporality, solid in its fluidity, and liberal in its illiberalism. Cynthia Weber’s (2017, 54) most recent critique of critical IR fits well in the fallacy of critique-without-alternative: “even though they know themselves to be working against all manner of disciplinary formations of knowledge, power, and practice, Critical IR scholars often stabilize these disciplinary formations through their opposition to them.” Moreover, recent attempts to displace peacebuilding and state-building discussions to broader philosophical debates has opened up the possibility for the critique of peacebuilding to lose any practical relevance. Consequently, scholars subscribing to the critique-without-alternative approach have stopped engaging with problem-solving, realist, and liberalist perspectives. As critical approaches now battle each other, the question is no longer how they can challenge dominant epistemological orthodoxies but how to rescue them before they lose practical relevance.