Donor Love Will Tear Us Apart: How Complexity and Learning Marginalize Accountability in Peacebuilding Interventions

Abstract Complexity theory and systems thinking are increasingly popular in both academic and practitioner discourses to “improve” peacebuilding. Recently, they have also been considered to make peacebuilding interventions more bottom-up and less exclusive. Contributing to the debate in international political sociology on the role of (professional) knowledge in shaping interventions, I examine this claim with an analysis of professional peacebuilding discourse. Drawing on an extensive corpus of operational guidance, policy documents, and interview material, I situate the emerging uses of concepts of complexity in peacebuilding against the backdrop of the power struggles of its actors and institutions. Against the introduction of measures of managerial control, professional peacebuilding discourse has cast its interventions as exceptional and in need of different methods. Thus, learning replaces donors’ standardized measures of accountability. However, the peculiar conflation of accountability as learning that emerges from these struggles legitimizes self-referential expert rule and learning, and marginalizes debates on peacebuilders’ accountability. Rather than “de-colonizing” or making peacebuilding more inclusive, the way complexity concepts have emerged in peacebuilding discourse reproduces—rather than questions—the power structures of international interventions, and denies the people targeted by interventions the status of subjects to be accountable to.