The Hidden Agency of the Demonized: Alternative Socio-Political Ordering(s) in Southeast European Post-Conflict Societies

Attempts to reduce violent, repressive and unequal 'character' of the dominant socio-political ordering(s) remains a priority for actors involved in peacebuiding. Identifying practices that challenge the dominant socio-political ordering(s) thus remains a fundamental priority for peacebuilding studies. The understanding of these practices is lacking because to date, scholarship has treated the micro level (practices of critical/ resisting agency) and the macro level (dominant socio-political ordering) as separate levels of analysis.

Using a novel interdisciplinary approach at the nexus of peacebuilding studies, social movement studies and organizational studies, AlternativeOrderings will integrate the two levels and break ground in the understanding of how specific practices of critical/resisting agency in post-conflict societies affect the dominant socio-political ordering vis-à-vis the fact that such ordering most often stays in (political) power.

The overarching goal of the project is twofold:
1. to determine the role of critical/resisting agency in challenging the dominant socio-political ordering and map these patterns to develop a typology of power/resistance in post-conflict societies;
2. to develop a novel theoretical perspective for the analysis of how critical/resisting agency is (re)shaping the exclusivist and ethnonationalist socio-political ordering.

An innovative pairwise comparison approach will be used: two post-conflict Southeast European ‘divided societies’ where alternative practices of critical/resisting agency that successfully challenged dominant socio- political ordering will be compared with three case studies where these practices failed to achieve the intended socio-political impact.

A multi-method research design will give unprecedented insights in the understanding of the ‘surface’ of the often-presumed status quo, when it comes to the exclusivist and ethnonationalist nature of post-conflict societies and their socio-political ordering.

The rationale of WP1 is to systematically engage in a bibliographical research and literature review to identify the needed methodological orientation and prepare the outline of the theoretical work. Another rationale of WP1 is to start to plan the case studies that will be systematically approached in WP2.

The purpose of WP2 is to select alternative practices in Southeast European post-conflict countries: Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We will focus on two pairs of alternative practices in each of the countries, namely: i) organised alternative practices of critical/resisting agency (social movements challenging the dominant socio-political ordering); ii) non-organised alternative practices of critical/resisting agency (individuals challenging the dominant socio-political ordering on their online platforms). These two pairs of alternative practices will then be contextualized within two outcomes, namely: i) alternative practices of critical/resisting agency that ‘failed’ to achieve the wanted socio-political impact (i.e., dominant socio-political ordering managed to stay in power); ii) alternative practices of critical/resisting agency that successfully challenged dominant socio- political orderings on either mezzo (i.e., municipal level) or macro level (i.e., governmental change) and thus challenged the dominant socio-political ordering.

Based on WP2, we will explore the structural frame of a post-conflict society, which is to be understood as ‘web’ of factors, consisting of at least six relevant groups of factors, which will be categorized in six sub-WPs: political, socioeconomic, sociological, historic, peacebuilding and discourse. For each, we will determine its role and power in upkeeping the dominant socio-political ordering and reflect upon how the alternative practices of critical/ resisting agency tends to challenge them amidst the fact that the ruling political elites tend to upkeep the existing status quo.

Rationale of WP4 is exploring alternative practices of critical/resisting agency in post-conflict societies from bellow, meaning that it will mostly rely on field work to empirically grasp and reflect upon the dynamics between resistance and power in selected post-conflict societies. This WP will draw on data acquired in WP1, WP2 and WP3 to situate the empirical data within appropriate conceptual and theoretical frames.

In this WP, we will synthesis data collected in previous WPs’ to establish a novel theoretical perspective.