The New Local: Reappraising Peacebuilding from the Grassroots

Abstract

A Crucial Link: Local Peace Committees and National Peacebuilding . By Andries Odendaal. Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2013. 192 pp., $16.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1601271815). Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict. By Mary B. Anderson and Marshall Wallace. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013. 193 pp., $18.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1588268778). Peacebuilding through Community-Based NGOs: Paradoxes and Possibilities. By Max Stephenson Jr. and Laura Zanotti. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2012. 98 pp., $19.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-1565494268). Recent scholarship on civil war has identified that conflict is waged on multiple levels. What if we thought about building peace in a similar, multilevel way? This article reviews three recent additions to the literature on peacebuilding and argues that, in distinguishing between local and national conflict dynamics, they mark a useful departure from the dominant treatment of the local in relation to “top-down” peacebuilding. Particular attention is paid to Odendaal’s thoughtful work on local peace committees and Anderson and Wallace’s compelling survey of communities that chose to “opt out” of war. By exploring situations of disjuncture, in which there is consensus for peace on either the local or national level but not both, these authors emphasize the importance of creating cross-level linkages. They also underscore the distinctive capability for peacebuilding, yet also violence and instability, that resides in the local level.