Careless Peacebuilding : A Poststructural Policy Analysis of the Afghanistan Study Group Final Report: A Pathway for Peace in Afghanistan (2021)

Sammanfattning: This thesis is a poststructural policy analysis, following the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’ (WPR) approach developed by Carol Bacchi (2016), of the Afghanistan Study Group final report: A Pathway for Peace in Afghanistan. Following the theoretical basis proposed by this method, the report is examined for discourses and power relations that construct the problem representation. The discourses identified of liberalism and ‘just war’ theory are shown to saturate the Afghanistan Study Group’s (ASG) report and can be traced through time, displayed by a genealogy of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (SCFR) hearings that took place between September, 11th, 2001 up until the ASG report was commissioned in 2019. It is argued that the peace recommendations and the analysis they are based upon are produced by the politicians and experts under a Western lens that perpetuates an Orientalist problem representation. The proposed lens, inspired by postcolonial theory, is argued to not only permeate the ASG report but also the mainstream peacebuilding discourse, among other fields which pertain to, and ultimately get in the way of, finding a pathway to peace.