Everyday Reconciliation: Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions of Relational Repair in the Aftermath of Violence

BackgroundThe long lasting resilience of individuals and communities affected by mass violence has not been given equal prominence as their suffering. This has often led to psychosocial interventions in post-conflict zones being unresponsive to local realities and ill-equipped to foster local strengths. Responding to the renewed interest in resilience in the field of violence and health, this study examines the resilience and post-traumatic responses of Indigenous Quechua women in the aftermath of the political violence in Peru (1980–2000).MethodsA cross-sectional study examined the relationship between resilience, post-traumatic responses, exposure to violence during the conflict and current life stress on 151 Quechua women participants. Purposive and convenience sampling strategies were used for recruitment in Ayacucho, the area most exposed to violence. The study instruments were translated to Quechua and Spanish and cross-culturally validated. Data was analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis. A locally informed trauma questionnaire of local idioms of distress was also included in the analysis.FindingsSixty percent of women (n = 91) were recruited from Ayacucho city and the rest from three rural villages; the mean age was 45 years old. Despite high levels of exposure to violence, only 9.3% of the sample presented a level of symptoms that indicated possible PTSD. Resilience did not contribute to the overall variance of post-traumatic stress related symptoms, which was predicted by past exposure to violence, current life stress, age, and schooling (R2 = .421). Resilience contributed instead to the variance of avoidance symptoms (Stand β = −.198, t = −2.595, p = 0.010) while not for re-experiencing or arousal symptoms.ConclusionsThese findings identified some of the pathways in which resilience and post-traumatic responses interrelate in the aftermath of violence; yet, they also point to the complexity of their relationship, which is not fully explained by linear associations, requiring further examination. Age and gender-sensitive health care is considered critical almost fifteen years after the end of the conflict. The notable resilience of Quechua women—despite exposure to a continuum of violence and social inequalities—also calls for enhanced recognition of women not only as victims of violence but also as complex social actors in the reconstruction of post-conflict societies.

This article describes the relations between Hindus and Muslims in a small town in central Gujarat following the massive violence against the Muslim minority community throughout many parts of the state between February and May 2002. While the ‘communal divide’ has become more pronounced following the 2002 attacks in many parts of the state as well as in the town in which the research was conducted, concerted efforts are made by members of both communities as a means of re-imposing a sense of ‘everyday peace’. As such, normative discourses presenting the 2002 violence as an aberration with respect to the state of local communal relations in the town represent a collective strategy of containing the tension and mutual suspicion which remain constant undercurrents in daily life. This article, moreover, explores the ongoing caste– and class-based social networks and interactions underlying public declarations of ‘everyday peace’ which have played a central role in, if not averting violence altogether, discouraging the development of further communal segregation and division in the aftermath of the 2002 attacks in the town.

This paper examines conflict-sensitivity/DNH through the lens of everyday peace. It draws on data from a local non-government organisation program working on development and peacebuilding between Rohingya Muslim and Rakhine Buddhist communities in Rakhine State, Myanmar. That program is framed around the everyday peace concept, the social practices commonly adopted by ordinary people as they seek to get on with daily life in ways that minimise risk, and perhaps work to deepen inter-communal relationships. Everyday peace thus has obvious overlaps with the DNH concept of “local capacities for peace” (LCPs). This paper analyses this program to make several contributions to the understanding of conflict-sensitivity from this framework, including expanded conceptions of LCPs and new warnings of potential harm inherent in what are often perceived as LCPs, unless power imbalances are concurrently addressed. These findings aim to improve conflict-sensitivity/DNH practice.

Collective memories on post-1945 episodes of mass violence in Asia developed without reference to Asia-specific origins or models. It is hard to forget episodes of massive violence without active disremembering and repression. Nevertheless, certain episodes remain unaddressed by official transitional justice institutions, and collective memories are often neglected and contested. The experiences from South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand demonstrate that democratization or liberalization works as a critical juncture for memory politics that places guilt or victimhood on specific individuals or groups with various means. Liberalizing political changes make it more conducive for victims and advocacy groups to voice their concerns and recall memories of the violent past. This can lead to institutional channels for memory-making under new democracies, although denial or indifference towards past mass violence can still occur, as in the case of the Indonesian Communist purge of 1965–1966. Memory politics that reflects on past violence is also possible under authoritarian regimes to some extent, as seen in post-Mao China and in Cambodia under Vietnamese occupation and thereafter. There are other circumstances prevent the production of official collective memories and also broader memory politics. In Aceh under Suharto’s Indonesia and in many parts of Myanmar prior to 2010, the lack of communication with the outside world was the main problem behind the weak or neglected memory. The stigma attached to victim groups and ambiguous authority hindered memory politics for victims of “mysterious killings” in Indonesia and the internal purge of the Communists in the Philippines, respectively. Memory contestation occurs beyond the dichotomy between outright denials and struggles for recognition. In the post-authoritarian Phlippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, the glorification of former authoritarian leaders coexists with victim-oriented official memories. In Timor-Leste, the contestation involved identities such as victims and heroes. Lastly, both courts and non-judicial institutions have contributed to creating international – bilateral and multilateral – memories of mass violence in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste.

This conclusion summarizes key insights from the former chapters, and highlights political dimensions of media use in digital everyday life. I particularly underline how our more digital everyday lives intensify communicative dilemmas, in which individuals in everyday settings negotiate with societal norms and power structures through their uses of media technologies. I also discuss how everyday media use connects us to different societal spheres and issues, also pointing to global challenges such as the pandemic and the climate crisis, arguing that everyday media use is key to our understandings of society. I discuss how to analyze this in media use research, emphasizing attention to processes of change and disruption.

This chapter explores what ordinary early modern people, common villagers and townsfolk, understood witchcraft to be, why they suspected certain people were witches, and how these suspicions fed into the witch hunts. The demonology only played a limited role in ordinary peoples’ understanding of witchcraft. Witchcraft and witch accusations alike were not aberrations from but extensions of neighborly conflict. The misfortunes ordinary early moderns saw as possible consequences of witchcraft varied widely. Interpersonal conflict was at the core of witchcraft, both actual, in the sense of rituals conducted and injuries inflicted, and suspected. While the everyday witch fears and activities of villagers and townspeople fed into the early modern hunts, the hunts fed back into everyday life. Magical beliefs, practices, and effects were a pervasive part of everyday life everywhere in Europe, but their specific forms varied enormously from place to place.

This research report is a case study on local peace practices within pastoralist communities in Kenya’s Turkana North (a subcounty of Kenya’s Turkana County). While significant existing research and analysis has focused on the concern that pastoralist communities across the African continent may contribute to growing violent conflict—and in particular to violent extremism—this report instead situates these communities within the theoretical framework of “everyday peace.” This framework centers on understanding the myriad ways in which ordinary people in conflict-affected contexts engage in small acts of peace and forge pro-social relationships that contribute to peace and stability within their communities. This report explores these everyday practices of peace within pastoralist communities in Kenya’s Turkana County, and Turkana North subcounty, a borderland territory that connects Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda with a long history of conflict around inter-clan livestock raiding and cross-border movement/land access. Informed by a multi-method research methodology that included semi-structured interviews, focus groups, historical profiling, transect walks, and non-participant observational data collected in August 2022, the findings from this study highlight both the existing local systems and resources for peacebuilding and conflict mitigation in pastoralist communities in Turkana, as well as the stressors and challenges that affect them. Lessons from this research contribute to our broader understanding of how policymakers and practitioners can work to better assess and coordinate violence prevention and reduction efforts in light of specific pastoralist needs and everyday practices of peace, particularly in areas impacted by violent conflict and/or violent extremism where pastoralist communities exist.

Report Calls for Public Health Approach to Addressing Mass Violence

Historians have long been accustomed to viewing ordinary men and women in the early modern English countryside as illiterate. They are thought to have had neither the opportunity nor the desire to acquire reading and writing skills that were superfluous to their everyday lives. This article challenges such a view. It draws on a sample of signed legal testimonies from the rural south-west of England, and pays particular attention to the different types of mark that deponents made. These marks have conventionally been treated as indicators of illiteracy. In fact, they reveal the existence of a hierarchy of writing skills, and widespread pen competency across social class and gender. This leads to a reassessment of how and why literacy skills might have been obtained by ordinary people. What emerges is that basic forms of literacy — the ability to make meaningful shapes with a pen, and the capacity to decipher individual letters — were both easy to pick up and of considerable utility when navigating the challenges of everyday rural life. The term ‘illiterate’ fails to do justice to this resourceful rural culture. The methodology deployed here could potentially be used to challenge assumptions of illiteracy in other times and places.

Current literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying involvement in twentieth-century mass violence and totalitarianisms. Radka Denemarková’s 2006 Peníze od Hitlera (Money from Hitler, 2009) and Elfriede Jelinek’s 2022 Angabe der Person (Indication/Ostentation of the Person) outline complicity with Nazi occupation, Stalinist terror, or other forms of mass violence among contemporaries and descendants. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, this boom prompts the question: why the interest in past complicities now? What the texts contribute to understanding the legacy of mass violence is that these acts are no punctual events, and that the present is implicated in the aftermaths of violence in ways that are prone to make commemoration complicit with it. Denemarková and Jelinek outline instances of the transmission and normalization of distinctions and terms used to justify mass violence and totalitarian terror across generations and ideological faultlines, into the neoliberal present. Both suggest that viewing different manifestations of violence as unrelated is a prominent form of denial that in fact fosters continuities that perpetuate violence. The article reads the literary texts in dialogue with social science approaches to the societal circulation of ideological language to demonstrate that key dynamics enabling continuities of justificatory discourse are a type of conformity with peer pressure and instrumentalization of ideological language for personal gain.

‘Everyday peace’ entered the literature over the past two decades, referring to ordinary people navigating everyday life in deeply divided societies, in ways that minimise conflict. Most cited is Mac Ginty’s ‘conceptual scoping’ paper, which culminates in a typology of social practices he argues constitutes everyday peace. Drawing on additional, detailed ethnographic studies, this paper proposes a re-think, presenting a total of eight everyday peace social practices:avoidance, reading, ambiguity, shielding, civility, reciprocity, solidarity and renunciation. This new typology applies across a wider spectrum of situations, better constitutes the full breadth of social practices, and more accurately reflects the diverse agency of actors seeking non-violent local coexistence. While noting its potential for wider peace formation /peacebuilding, this paper cautions about its potential to perpetuate injustice and highlights its vulnerability to manipulation.

Community development approaches to peacebuilding usually focus on strengthening social cohesion, finding common ground, bringing groups together and negotiation. However, this is not always immediately safe or possible after serious intercommunal violence. The idea of ‘everyday peace’ has recently emerged in the literature, to describe the ways in which ordinary individuals and groups navigate everyday life in deeply divided societies, to avoid or minimise both awkward situations and conflict triggers. At one end of the spectrum, everyday peace may create a safe space in which things appear normal, despite the conflict, allowing people to get on with life. At this level, everyday peace could be seen as the first peace, with inter-group contact after violence, or the last peace in the sense of being the last remaining bridging social capital before total rupture. In this chapter, the authors explore the concepts of the everyday and of everyday peace in detail, highlighting its relevance to community development practice, particularly that which adopts appreciative inquiry and awareness-raising approaches (Elliott, 1999; Bushe, 2011).

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a university. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a university education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945; and it sets up a contest between two version of the university: one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.

Reviewed by: Everyday Life in Central Asia. Past and Present ed. by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca Dorena Caroli (bio) Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca (Eds.), Everyday Life in Central Asia. Past and Present (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). 401 pp. Maps, black and white photographic illustrations. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-253-21904-6. Everyday life in the Soviet Union and in the former Soviet republics has constituted a main field of investigation in recent decades and has disclosed the way in which the traditional and national cultures survived through socialism or were surpassed by a longing for modernity and modernization.1 This new and interesting volume edited by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca fills an important gap in the history of everyday life of Central Asia. This region was studied in past decades more from the point of view of building democracy, religious extremism and terrorism, natural resource holding, and the war in Afghanistan. The editors’ challenging task concerned not only the large variety of topics included in the collection but also the coordination of twenty-three well-known scholars dealing with the different aspects of everyday life in Central Asia, including the topics of Turkmen [End Page 464] nomads, Afghan villagers, Kazakh scientists, Kyrgyz border guards, Tajik “strongmen” and guardians of religious shrines in Uzbekistan. The volume also includes a very useful selected bibliography and index of names and topics. The introduction presents some reflections on “everydayness” in Central Asia, the geopolitical features of this huge region (located between the Caspian Sea, the Urals, the middle range of the Altai and Tien Shan mountains, and the Hindu Kush), and a historical survey covering the period from the 1930s to the beginning of the Afghan war. It is followed by five thematic sections dealing with gender, religion, power, culture, and wealth. As the editors argue in the introduction, the links between the past and the present constitute the core of the volume, revealing the “significance of the Soviet transformation of Central Asian culture and society”: In addition to political leaders and systems, the continuities of the Soviet era are anchored in multiple aspects of everyday life – the way people read, learn, work, and think. Soviet legacies go to the heart of modern identity of various Central Asian peoples. We focus specifically on what Central Asians themselves have to say about this identity issue, which varies, of course, depending on their level of interest in notions such as cultural dominance and transformation. We aim to impress upon readers the centrality of the intertwined Russian, Soviet, and Marxist transformations among ordinary people from the semi-desert environments of western Uzbekistan to the lush valleys of the Pamir Mountains shared by Tajiks and Kyrgyz, to say nothing of the cosmopolitan setting of Almaty and Tashkent … [I]mperial and Soviet experiences themselves were shaped at the level of everyday life by local customs, behaviors, and traditions (P. 9). The originality of this volume consists not only in the detailed and multidisciplinary presentation of everyday life in the region but also in the fact that “Ordinary people in Central Asia emerge … as agents in a series of complex transformations” (P. 9). The only chapter in the first section, by Scott Levi, deals with the role of the communities of Turks and Tajiks in Central Asian history. He looks for the key factors that have shaped the region over centuries, describing how modern-day Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, and Uzbeks were formed out of various Turkic-speaking groups, how [End Page 465] Iranian-speaking groups became Tajiks, and how the lines between ethnic groups shifted due to socioeconomic, political, and demographic factors. Islam, spreading across Central Asia from the eighth century to the eighteenth, also continually evolved, adopting beliefs and practices from older religious systems and adding those from new arrivals. (P. 13) The second section deals with communes, which have been of critical importance across Central Asia because they acted as “anchors” during the transition, and highlights how “group loyalties today remain multilayered, even as many residents of Central Asia identify themselves as Afghans, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, or Uzbeks, or, in a larger sense, as Muslims” (P. 33). The four chapters constituting...

ABSTRACTThis volume explores the analytical productivity of the convergence of two bodies of theory: materiality, defined here as the mutually constitutive relationships between people and the material world, and everyday life, conceived of as the ordinary practices that comprise most of human existence. An engagement with materiality and everyday life reveals three interventions critical to archaeological research. First, archaeological studies of the somewhat ethereal concept of materiality benefit from a grounding in the context of material engagements in everyday life. Second, the seemingly mundane and ordinary material practices of everyday life are of crucial significance for society in such varied arenas as politics, commerce, and cosmology. Third, the study of the materiality of everyday life necessarily implicates fruitful attention to multiple social and temporal scales.