ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to draw out an understanding of the role of narratives and discourses of cultural difference and of civil society development, within international statebuilding, through the location of the discourse of culture as a transitional stage between interventionist and regulatory discourses of race and of civil society. It particularly seeks to highlight that the discourse of civil society is key to understanding the statebuilding discourses of intervention and regulation that have developed in the past decade. In drawing out the links between the framings of cultural divides and of civil society, this chapter seeks to explain how the discourse of civil society intervention has been reinvented on the basis of the moral divide established and cohered through the discourse of culture and how the discourse of civil society contains a strong apologetic content, capable of legitimizing and explaining the persistence of social and economic problems or political fragmentation while simultaneously offering potential policy programmes on the basis of highly ambitious goals of social transformation.