The ‘local turn’ and notions of conflict and peacebuilding – Reflections on local peace committees in Burundi and eastern DR Congo

Abstract

ABSTRACT Both political scientists and development practitioners express renewed interest in the ‘local’ in peacebuilding, and a need to better engage with local communities’ concerns, perspectives and capacities. Developing scholarship highlights how such discourses essentialise the ‘local’, and obscure the role of interveners in its construction. This paper argues that thinking in terms of ‘local’ peacebuilding configures particular understandings of what conflict and peacebuilding entail. It depicts local conflict as something that can be addressed in isolation, and neutralises local peacebuilding agendas. Experiences of community-based peacebuilding in Burundi and eastern DR Congo instead show ‘local’ peacebuilders’ pragmatic efforts to move beyond ‘local’ conflict, and significant local contestation about the kinds of peace, justice and social transformation envisaged. The paper concludes that a concern with the ‘local’ in peacebuilding may make interveners gloss over important contributions of so-called ‘local’ stakeholders to structural peace and state-formation, and so effectively disempower them.