The International Community as Studied

Scholars usually approach the international community as a rhetorical and legitimising device (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2011; Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2005; Ellis 2009).

Some academics argue that the international community may be rhet­oric, practice, and a specific actor group (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2009: 74). Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn rightly suggest we should be approaching ‘the international community’ in the various con­texts in which it is used by political actors. Such a research stance allows the exploration of changing images and protagonists of ‘the international community’ in localised contexts such as the intervention in Afghanistan or the manipulations of the image of the international community by local elites in the Balkans (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2009). In 2002, the journal Foreign Policy dedicated a forum to the question, ‘What is the international community?’, which indeed exposed a variety of inter­pretations, ranging from idealised—‘a shared vision for a better world’— to highly critical—‘a dangerous reference point for the naive’ (Foreign Policy 2002).

The flaw shared by most of the interpretations, however, is that they approach the problem too literally. Foreign Policy, formulating the ques­tion in terms of ‘what is?’, proceeds from a standpoint assuming there can be a satisfactory answer given to the query. Such a question resem­bles a positivist search aspiring to discover and describe something exist­ing in the real world to the disregard of potential strengths of reflexivist methodology in approaching this problem. Such framing is almost mechanically conducive to reification of what might have more value if approached as an idea. On the other side of the spectrum, arguments for the contextualization of the international community, though commend­able, run the risk of removing one important aspect of discursive uses of the international community: the pretence of portraying the international in holistic and universal terms. Localisation, proposed by Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn, does not allow for engagement with consequences of according global reach and universal validity to the international commu­nity. A cursory glance at statebuilding policy documents reveals, however, that these are important features the international community acquires in practitioners’ discourse.