Research

In recent years, post-peace agreement societies have increasingly been governed through stabilisation policies aimed at preventing relapse into armed conflict. Northern Ireland is often treated as an internationally renowned ‘success story.’ However, segregation, political polarisation, and paramilitarism remain pervasive. Alongside this, a mounting mental health crisis and persistently high suicide rates further unsettle the dominant narrative of the peace process. While extant critical scholarship on liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding has shown how stabilisation measures prioritise a logic of conflict containment that permits the reproduction of ‘wartime’ orders during ‘peacetime,’ the structural conditions of this logic and its immanent effects require further exploration.

Drawing primarily on Lacanian psychoanalysis, and in dialogue with Althusserian structuralism and Mbembean necropolitics, the thesis problematises success-based accounts of peace processes by showing how peacebuilding undermines the peace it nominally seeks to promote through its structural aim of order containment and becomes a death-driven structure. A peace process’s failure to address trauma healing, reconciliation, and integration is not simply a consequence of ‘good enough’ peacebuilding but a structural condition for its continued reproduction of the sociopolitical order born out of conflict. Out of the subtraction between the negative peace achieved and the positive peace deferred, a surplus of violence emerges: institutionalised trauma, post-paramilitarism, and exposure to mental distress and suicidality. I conceptualise the governance of this remainder as autoktonopower, namely the post-conflict management of trauma and the differential distribution of liveability in contained spaces or communities. In the book, autoktonopower becomes one modality of traumatopolitics.

Through the study of post-Brexit Northern Ireland, the thesis employs a Lacanian and vernacular approach to discourse analysis, drawing on over 100 interviews alongside official governmental and non-governmental data and reports. First, it analyses the autoktonopolitical technologies of peacebuilding: the siloing of peacebuilding from mental healthcare and trauma healing through peace funding and peace bureaucracy, the grassroots offloading of responsibility, and the persistence of segregated education. Second, it examines the phenomenon of post-paramilitarism, how it emerges through development and reintegration funding projects and programmes and drug trafficking, appeasement and community policing, and the ideological regimes of normalisation and intelligibility that disavow it. Third, it shows how the psychological fallout of death-driven peacebuilding and post-paramilitary social control compounds with the institutionalisation of trauma and the privatisation of suicidality. Finally, the thesis applies the Lacanian peacebuilding framework and discourse analysis to the post-2016 Colombian case in order to stress-test the arguments of the thesis.