Navigating the Local

Abstract

This book explores how local peace is built and performed in Lebanon through empirical material from the municipalities of Tyre, Bourj Hammoud and Saida. The book highlights three key points brought forward in the local peacebuilding literature: that peace needs to respond to local needs, that the people living the peace built must be included in building it, and, that peacebuilding in the local space is connected to actors and activities on the national and international level. From these key points, the book explains how local service delivery, local interactions and vertical relationships matter for building peace. Through the stories of municipal councillors, municipal employees, and civil society actors active in the three local spaces, the book demonstrates that local governments hold peacebuilding potential by implementing, for example, waste management, infrastructural developments and social services. At the same time, how local activities and agencies are performed relates to the local context and its relationship to other actors and levels of government. Thus, illustrating how local governments navigate local, national and international spaces to implement local peacebuilding activities, the book argues that politics and societal divides impact how local peacebuilding is performed and what kind of peace(s) is built. Taken together, the book finds that in Lebanon, local peacebuilding is performed through politicized local governance, upholding peace, and conflict, sometimes at the same time.