The word "inclusion" is one of the most beautiful words in peacebuilding vocabulary. But such a beautiful word also has very high chance of becoming a curtain. Behind that curtain, the agenda is already written, the categories are already chosen, the indicators for measuring success are already set. The local community is only invited to decorate that process with authenticity.


This is what happen when inclusion without interpretive power become managed exclusion (Mac Ginty, 2015). Or to say more clearly, what if inclusion that cannot change who define reality is just polite domination?


The deception of representation in the meeting room


Let us imagine. Picture a peace workshop. There are women, there are youth, there are ethnic minority representatives, there are displaced people, there are local leaders. The meeting room look very diverse. If take photo, it look very beautiful. We can title the report as "inclusive dialogue."


But when were these people invited? After the agenda was written? After the key words for discussion were chosen? After the indicators for measuring success were decided? Whose language is the facilitator controlling? In that case, the room has many people, but the "reality-making power" is not diverse. The politics cannot be renegotiated. Cooke and Kothari (2001) warned about this in their paper "participation: the new tyranny?"—that participation can become a new form of oppression where people are invited not to have decision power but to approve what has already been decided.


Silent exclusion under technical language


This kind of exclusion is not always intentional. What is more worse is when it happen without knowing. And the thing that is doing this exclusion is technical language.


Look at the word "stakeholder." This word make it seem like everyone is at the same table. But being at the same table hides the inequality of power. Some people design the table, some people are only invited. They get tokenism. The word "resilience" is similar. Praising local people's suffering capacity sometimes become a way to avoid the responsibility of changing the structural systems that make them suffer (Chandler, 2014). In the middle of a civil war, if we only ask people to be resilient without giving them power to define their own reality, it is like saying "just endure whatever happen." "Capacity building" can also imply that local people lack knowledge, and create a power relation where outside people need to train them.


These words may seem neutral, but actually they are tools that hide power relations. Jabri (1996) pointed this out, saying that discourses do not only describe the world but construct the world.


Consultation turning into extraction


Another common problem is when consultation turn into extraction. Local communities give their life stories, their wounds, their legitimacy, and their emotional evidence.


Institutions take those stories. Then they transform them into reports, proposals, indicators. The storytellers are left with nothing. This is a new kind of colonialism that extract language and meanings (Smith, 2012).


A woman being in the room versus restructuring the room


Let us take the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda as an example. I need to say that this agenda is a very important framework, and it aim to promote women's participation in peace processes. I do not deny this at all. But we need to look at when this framework become weak.


If women are only invited as symbols, and they do not have the power to redefine words like "security," "justice," "livelihood," "trauma," "protection", if they cannot shape those meanings into policy, then the WPS become weak.


A woman being in the room is not the same as feminist restructuring of the room. Just being in the room does not change the room's rules, the room's language, the room's power structure. Björkdahl and Selimovic (2015) have critiqued this tendency in implementing the WPS framework where women are seen not as agentive persons but as victims to be protected. Just because elite women come sit in the room does not automatically change the life of working-class women.


Digital risk of exclusion


PeaceTech, which means digital peacebuilding, promise that using digital tools can expand people's participation. Online surveys, virtual consultations, AI and data analysis can reach many people at once. But these technologies can also make exclusion more invisible.


Let us imagine. An online survey say it is "open for everyone." But think of people without internet access, without digital literacy, people who are afraid to show their name online, people who do not understand the survey's language. Can they participate? If the survey's questions and categories are predetermined by donors, and even if the number of responses is high but the depth of meaning is not there, then when AI summarize that data, the meanings of minority groups become even more disappeared.


So in PeaceTech, we must be careful not to mistake data volume for democratic depth. Digital participation that ignore safety, interpretation, and power relations can just become digital exposure (Kahl & Puig Larrauri, 2013).


Toward epistemic inclusion


If we go to the root of these problems, we see that real inclusion require epistemic inclusion. This is more than physical presence, more than giving advice. We have a problem if we call people coming to sit as inclusion. People must have the power to help define what is called "harm," what is called "peace," what is called "justice," what is called "safety," what is called "success."


Local people are not only beneficiaries of peace. They are the ones producing peace in their everyday lives. Mac Ginty's (2014) concept of "everyday peace" emphasize this. Ordinary people, in order to survive between conflicts, create small practices like tolerance, avoidance, mutual help. These practices may be building more sustainable peace than the agreements signed by top leaders.


Do not measure inclusion by attendance list


To conclude, we must stop measuring "inclusion" by "attendance." Instead of looking at how many people are in the room, we must look at who has the power to define the problem, who has the power to decide priorities, who has the power to evaluate success.


We must assess "inclusion" by influence. This is the real essence of conflict sensitivity. Conflict sensitivity require understanding relationships and contexts, not just putting people into activities (Conflict Sensitivity Consortium, 2012).


If inclusion is not redistributing the "power to define what reality is", then it is not yet inclusion. It is still a polite domination, or even more worse, an invited exclusion. We must always ask this question: Are people being invited to decorate a cage, or are they being invited to redesign the house itself?