Beyond the thrall of the state: Governance as a relational

Although the idea of the state pervades the scholarship and practice of international interventions, developing adequate knowledge of intervention contexts such as Solomon Islands requires decentring dominant perceptions about possible sources of socio-political order. In response, this article demonstrates the value of ‘relationality’ and ‘affect’ for analysing the diverse ways in which governance arises as an effect of social practice, without assuming that the state is unimportant or romanticizing statelessness. Giving conceptual priority to relations over entities while considering hitherto neglected affective forms of human interaction enables the identification of diverse micro-political forms of socio-political order and peace governance effects. An autoethnographic examination of relational-affective peace governance in post-conflict Solomon Islands shows that circulations of affect, feeling and emotion attach more strongly to customary and church institutions than they do to the state or to international interveners. This demonstrates the need to engage with unexpected sources of governance while the requirement to analyse findings within a broader historical frame signals the need to also engage with the state. A relational-affective approach, which has the potential for wider application, thus provides a way of analysing and engaging with diverse forms of political order in international interventions beyond the predilections of Northern scholarship