Indicators and Success Stories: The UN Sustaining Peace Agenda, Bureaucratic Power, and Knowledge Production in Post-War Settings

Abstract

Abstract Most discussions on knowledge production in peacebuilding and conflict management have focused on the study of epistemic communities and strategic coalitions of global and local actors. This article shifts the focus away from who produces knowledge to the underexplored question of how knowledge is generated, repackaged, deployed, or ignored. Combining sociology of knowledge approaches with feminist governmentality scholarship, I critically interrogate the role of reports as knowledge production artifacts and report writing as bureaucratic practices that serve to design and implement UN Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) projects on Sustaining Peace. Specifically, I analyze the role of reports and reporting in four PBF projects on gender and reconciliation in Liberia, and I show how through the mechanisms of persuasion and homogenization, reports serve not only to measure success and failure and to produce contextualized knowledge, but also to exert symbolic power, (re)producing authoritative knowledge on women, gender and reconciliation, and giving legitimacy to external interventions. Studying how knowledge is produced instead of who produces it enables us to apprehend the entanglement of the local and the global and overcome simplistic binaries and oppositions, all while paying attention to how the production of knowledge, and its silences, remains embedded in global power relations.