| Summary/Abstract |
In examining different forms of pragmatic peacebuilding—including the turn to the local, hybrid orders, resilience and non-state actors—this article argues that such approaches bring about analytical and normative challenges that are difficult to deal with within state-centred frameworks. As an alternative, the article develops the notion of ‘governscapes’ as a framing device that can help examine, first, the uneven ways in which the use of force and forms of governance circulate and spread within and beyond state boundaries and, second, how pragmatic peacebuilding approaches play into emerging landscapes of authority and governance. It is argued that pragmatic peacebuilding approaches place too little emphasis on the capacity for using violence that characterizes many of the ‘non-state’ actors that exercise some kind of authority against or alongside state authorities. Finally, the article examines cases in which international actors have engaged non-state actors in order to promote peacebuilding. In one case, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, international actors aimed to build multilevel security arrangements; in other cases that the article mentions, international NGOs and organizations have sought, through partial recognition, to make armed non-state actors more accountable to the populations they control.
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