Impact, value for money, effectiveness and similar buzzwords have become common ground in peacebuilding. The application of technical instruments to manage and measure peacebuilding is hardly questioned anymore: it is presented as a minor adaptation to improve policy and practice in this field.
Against this interpretation, this paper argues that the focus on results is shifting the very foundations of peacebuilding and its legitimacy. Enabled in a set of discourses, a machinery of practices and institutions has been installed, which is removing peacebuilding from the political realm and firmly placing it under the rule of technical experts. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse analysis, this paper analyses how this apparatus subjugates local accounts to peacebuilding. Based on ethnographic field research in Myanmar it also explores discursive strategies of local actors in a specific context; and how they are aiming to create spaces for agency to challenge this machinery.
