Reframing Responsibility: The limitations and potential of international narratives in statebuilding

Statebuilding is widely defined as a comprehensive and external exercise that aims to shape economic, security and administrative structures and institutions in a post-conflict society by promoting liberal internationalist norms. This thesis proposes that the narratives on statebuilding assign limited responsibility to international actors engaged in statebuilding, despite its comprehensive and intrusive nature: a mismatch dubbed as the ¨responsibility gap¨. It continues to propose that the limited attribution of responsibility to actors engaged in external statebuilding is possible through ¨discursive safeguards¨ inherent in the framing of statebuilding. These propositions are tested in four stages: a) conducting a frame and discourse analysis on statebuilding in order to understand the way international responsibilities are framed, b) formulating an alternative framework to attribute responsibility by utilizing perspectives on moral responsibility, c) comparing these two frameworks to identify a responsibility gap in the way the statebuilding frame attributes responsibility to external actors, d) pointing out the discursive safeguards in international narratives that allow sustaining the responsibility gaps. As a last step, the propositions are tested through a case study, on the involvement of the European Union in Bosnia and Herzegovina.