A Bottom-up Approach to Peacebuilding

Abstract

Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor. By Paula M. Pickering Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. 242 pp., $39.95 cloth (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4576-7). In Peacebuilding in the Balkans: the View from the Ground Floor , Paula M. Pickering attempts to re-center our attention on the dynamic process by which ordinary people build the micro-foundations of peace in their everyday lives. She argues that efforts to build peace from the top-down fail to recognize what is happening at the individual level, and these efforts fail to support the progress ordinary citizens are able to make in rebuilding their lives (p. 165). The central theme of the book is that in post-conflict societies ordinary people soldier on, rebuilding their lives in spite of polarized elites, weak institutions, and the international community. Pickering's analysis begins with a basic question: why would refugees who fled ethnic cleansing campaigns return to communities where they will almost certainly face intense discrimination? To answer this question, she merges interviews, the occasional statistical analysis, and extensive fieldwork with a “multilevel” theoretical framework developed by Robert Kaiser and Elena Nikiforova (2006). The “multilevel model” integrates a range of actors and institutions to understand the context in which ordinary people exist and forge cooperative (or non-cooperative) relations. This range of actors and institutions includes the nationalizing state and external homelands as well as local, national, and transnational activists. This multilevel model is an intriguing conceptual tool, simultaneously offering to banish overly simplistic views of identity and incentives while bringing order to the complex tangle of actors that affect ordinary people. Unfortunately, Pickering does not incorporate the multilevel model to …