Optionality and peace in Kyrgyzstan : exploring, critiquing, and rethinking understandings and practices of peace

Abstract

This thesis proposes a novel approach to rethinking peacebuilding and peace studies beyond the limitations of the liberal/post-liberal binary, bringing together theory and practice in order to develop and implement this approach. The thesis explores understandings and practices of peace in Kyrgyzstan in both the everyday context and in the context of a peacebuilding project undertaken by the country’s largest peacebuilding NGO. In order to do so the concept of optionality is developed and expounded methodologically, as a critical device, and, finally, as a reconstructive norm. Developed through a symptomatic reading of the works of Karl Mannheim, Hans Morgenthau, and Hannah Arendt, optionality has three key aspects: the recognition and facilitation of the context-bound nature of knowledge and the resultant condition of epistemic perspectivity; the recognition and facilitation of plurality and natality as essential human conditions; and a resultant opposition to essentialising, instrumentalising, or totalising approaches to knowledge: in short, an opposition to the imposition of knowledge. In its application as methodology, optionality operationalises these aspects in an approach towards the field that recognises the contingencies and conditionalities of the general human condition and epistemic perspectivity. As a critical device, optionality is employed to examine the understandings and practices of peace of the NGO and their project, operating as a yardstick that detects and deciphers totalising/standardising/functionalising approaches to peace. In its subsequent role as a reconstructive norm, optionality presents the normative conditions of the possibility for peace, building upon its critical assessment to develop an explicitly normative rethinking of peacebuilding and expounding a related series of practical approaches that embody this reconstruction.