Everyday Peace

Abstract

This book focuses on how individuals and communities navigate through, and out of, conflict. Through theory and concept-building and empirical examples, it investigates the pro-peace tactical agency deployed by individuals and communities in conflict-affected contexts. It examines how compassion, humanity, civility, and solidarity can take root in unlikely circumstances—even in the midst of war—and the possibility of everyday peace scaling up and out to disrupt violent conflict. The book develops a number of key concepts, including Everyday Peace Power and conflict disruption, to help us understand how everyday ‘small peace’ actions can accumulate into movements and processes that may have wider significance. In addition to a detailed conceptualization of everyday peace, the book is interested in how local-level peace might connect with other levels (national, international, and transnational) and uses the notion of circuitry to explain how different levels of society might influence one another. In an unusual departure for peace and conflict studies, the book draws on World War I and II memoirs and personal diaries to investigate the possibility of everyday peace in extreme circumstances (such as the battlefield) but also to illustrate that many of the possibilities and challenges associated with everyday peace are, in fact, timeless.