3 - Local Reactions

Summary

Time and again, across all of my field sites, I heard the same kind of criticisms levied against interveners, and so did researchers working in other conflict zones. Our local interviewees would complain that international peacebuilders were “arrogant,” “condescending,” and “paternalistic.” Certain phrases recurred constantly: Interveners were characterized as “bossy” and “preachy” (“donneurs de leçons”) because “they arrive and immediately tell people what to do.”

My contacts then emphasized a point that is critical for the debates on international peacebuilding: They explained that the arrogance of foreign interveners resulted from their valuing thematic expertise over local knowledge. This attitude stems from the belief that outside approaches are better than local ones and from the attendant disregard of local ideas. For instance, a Congolese elite criticized the “pride” interveners take in seeing themselves as experts who employ a scientific approach to extricate people from crises and promote development. A Congolese grassroots peacebuilder concurred: For the international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations (UN) agencies, “there is conceit around this idea of assistance.” To him, the “‘I help you, I bring you aid’ idea leads to arrogance” because the international expert “arrives with his methods and his knowledge, and tells you ‘you should do this and not that’” and discounts local ideas and expertise. Recipients of intervention whom the Listening Project teams interviewed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ecuador, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, the Solomon Islands, and Thailand made a similar point. They complained that “outsiders ignore their ideas and knowledge,” a process that they found “fundamentally disrespectful.” A South African diplomat acknowledged that he and his colleagues were guilty of such prejudice, explaining: “We treat African counterparts with a lot of arrogance,” based on the idea that “we know better, we know that this works so you should do this.” He attributed this attitude to the politics of knowledge at work in Peaceland.