Abstract
Critiques of liberal, top-down approaches to peacebuilding have motivated a discussion of alternative, locally-led, and community-based approaches to achieving and maintaining sustainable peace. This article uses a case study of women's savings and credit cooperatives in post-violence Nepal to examine the ways in which grassroots-based, locally-led peace initiatives can counter top-down approaches. The article presents ethnographic evidence from fieldwork in Nepal on how cooperatives expand through their everyday activities the definition of peace to include not only the absence of violence (negative peace) but transformatory goals such as social justice (positive peace). By focusing on ongoing root causes of structural violence, cooperatives problematize the postconflict period where pre-war normalcy is presumed to have returned. They emphasize local agency and ownership over formal peace processes. The findings suggest ongoing struggles that cooperatives face due to their existence within larger, liberal paradigms of international postconflict aid and reconstruction assistance. Their uneasy relationship with liberal economic structures limit their scale and scope of effectiveness even as they provide local alternatives for peacebuilding.
Highlights
Nepal emerged from a decade-long Maoist-inspired war in 2006 when a comprehensive treaty was signed between rebels and government
During the Maoist insurgency, large and formal institutions, especially those associated with foreign aid or development organizations, came under attack for being “anti-poor”
A few of them emerged as grassroots peace constituencies to mitigate the effects of conflict and of structural violence and partnered with larger development organizations for Bottom-up, locally-led peacebuilding endeavors can carve out spaces to negotiate the meanings and processes of peace by refocusing attention on an underlying endemic structural violence that may have given rise to war in the first place
Summary
Are cooperatives successful in formulating a political economy of postwar peacebuilding that is truly grassroots-oriented? The liberal discourse on peace has largely focused on macroeconomic restructuring in war-torn states rather than the protection of the poor and it has assigned responsibility to war-torn states for recovery without transferring to them the corresponding power for self-determination. The discursive hegemony that the liberal model has enjoyed means that the very existence of cooperatives as alternative spaces for grassroots peacebuilding provides fodder for optimism. Through their focus on endemic structural violence, SACCOs have highlighted the limitations of the liberal model and its myopic, “quick-fix” approach to peacebuilding and postwar reconstruction. Cooperatives potentially articulate a grassroots political economy of peacebuilding that builds the basis for more sustainable forms of peace, based on social justice, not the absence of violence. Established grassroots cooperatives are better positioned to negotiate terms and resist impositions Fledgling organizations such as the majority of Nepal’s SACCOs face significant challenges, especially in the context of postwar scarcity. See Wehnert and Shakya (2003); interviews conducted by the author corroborate this information
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