The politics of knowledge: ethnicity, capacity and return in post-conflict reconstruction policy

A new casting of diasporas, exiles and returnees as potentially transformative agents in post-conflict polities is the topic of this article. ‘Return of Qualified Expatriates’ programmes have recently been launched by international agencies in a number of post-conflict countries in an attempt to promote better capacity-building within post-conflict states institutions. This article argues that the ostensible technical orientation of these programmes is misleading, and they have a political significance which is noted and contested locally. In political terms, they represent attempts to smuggle Western hierarchies of knowledge into post-conflict reconstruction efforts under the cover of ethnic solidarity, to the detriment of local participation and empowerment. The article argues further that this is always contested by interested parties locally, often by mobilising alternative capacities, labelled ‘authentic’, in opposition. As such, strategies that attempt to use ethnic ties to overcome this local contestation are placing a significant burden on ethnic categories that are slippery, malleable and contested in post-conflict contexts. These points are demonstrated with reference to the cases of Cambodia and Timor-Leste. Caroline Hughes is Director of the Asia Research Centre and Associate Professor of Governance Studies in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Murdoch University. The last fifteen years have seen a shift in the nature of international perspectives on war, and, concomitantly, in beliefs about building states to maintain peace. Since the early 1990s, popular perspectives on intra-state wars have privileged explanations rooted in essentialist ideas about ethnicity and an assumed propensity of ethnic groups to vie violently with one another for access to money and power. In a range of post-war countries, from the Balkans to Rwanda, Iraq and * I would like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, which funded the research upon which this article is based. A version of this article was first presented at the workshop on Southeast Asian Exiles: Crossing Cultural, Political and Religious Borders, at the Australian National University. Thanks are due to the participants of that workshop for their helpful comments, and to the reviewers at Review of International Studies. 1 See discussion in I would like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, which funded the research upon which this article is based. A version of this article was first presented at the workshop on Southeast Asian Exiles: Crossing Cultural, Political and Religious Borders, at the Australian National University. Thanks are due to the participants of that workshop for their helpful comments, and to the reviewers at Review of International Studies. Christopher Clapham, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing (London: Hurst, 2006), pp. 99–103. Review of International Studies (2011), 37, 1493–1514 2011 British International Studies Association doi:10.1017/S0260210511000210 First published online 12 May 2011