Peace and the debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq: Lessons for future peacemaking and peacebuilding scholarship

Critical knowledge production and the accumulated knowledge and practices around peace and intervention was largely ignored in relation to the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequent stabilisation exercises indicated a continuing tendency to adopt a Western epistemic lens and ignore local and regional contexts and perspectives. This was either ignored or co-opted by ‘global’ security concerns (seen through an American prism), and has laid the way for the substantial reduction in peacekeeping and peacemaking activities in the current, more authoritarian era. Reflecting on the role of Peace and Conflict Studies in the aftermath of the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions, this article considers the limitations of the discipline, the tendency towards policy-driven research, and the disastrous rush for ‘impact’. It argues that ‘future peacemaking’ praxis needs to heed critical warnings from the failure over the last thirty years to engage with global and social legitimacy, and with the growing body of scholarship connecting peace with legitimacy, sustainability, and justice.