This book unfolds an exploratory journey intended to scrutinise the suitability of entanglements and relations as a mode of thinking and seeing peacebuilding events. Through a reflection upon the UN's limited results in the endeavour towards securing lasting peace in war-torn scenarios, Torrent critically engages with three relevant debates in contemporary peacebuilding literature, including the inclusion of 'the locals', the achievement of organisational system-wide coherence and the increasingly questioned agential condition of peacebuilding actors. Inattentive to the relational vulnerability of involved stakeholders, it is suggested that the UN seeks to secure a totalising modern distory, defined in the book as a story that undoes other stories. Whilst affirming the entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes in the conflict-affected configuration, Entangled Peace also delves into a cautionary argument about what the author refers to as entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, normative, deterministic and exclusionary projection of a relational world. Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, Entangled Peace is an invitation to speculate over the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader theatre of the real, as radical openness, in which events emanate from the collision of an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds.
Ignasi Torrent is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at University of Hertfordshire. He is also a research member of the Critical Humanities and International Politics Research Group (CHIP), based in the same university. He holds a PhD in International Relations from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His previous academic affiliations include the University of Sierra Leone in Freetown, the City University of New York and the University of Westminster in London. His research interests are framed in the area of Critical Peace and Conflict Studies, the Anthropocene as well as new materialisms and their limits.
Introduction Chapter 1. Failing to Know and Engage 'the Locals' in Peacebuilding Chapter 2. System-Wide Coherence and the Problems of Linearity in Peacebuilding Chapter 3. Rethinking Agency in Complexity-Sensitive Peacebuilding Chapter 4. Entangled Peace and its Limits Chapter 5. Peacebuilding Distories and the Ethics of Entangled Peace Conclusion Interviews
