Agency In Peacebuilding Research Articles

The many conceptions of post-conflict reconciliation: learning from practitioners

ABSTRACT Reconciliation is a ubiquitous concept in peacebuilding, marred by a disconnect between philosophical perspectives and practical realities. The concept's broad range of meanings produce differing and potentially contradicting policy recommendations. Moreover, although reconciliation is embedded in intimate community relationships, grassroots reconciliation initiatives are often treated as dependent on national and international programmes loosing their conceptual agency. The paper explores the impact of different views of reconciliation, defined by two main characteristics: whether they are relational or reflexive and whether they set well-defined goals or take an open-ended approach. Consequently, five reconciliation types emerge: instrumental, dialogical, restorative, transformative, and experiential. Each reflects unique views of conflict and peace and different visions of what it takes to transform society. The typology contributes to a comparative study of peacebuilding processes and encourages paying greater attention to local politics and communitarian agency in peacebuilding and reconciliation processes.

Hope amid violence: youths’ agency and learning experiences to transform social conflicts in non-democratic settings

Understanding and addressing conflicts underlying direct and indirect violence is necessary to build a just and sustainable peace. This study foregrounds youths’ voices and lived experiences of social conflicts in Iran, an understudied (semi-)authoritarian context in the Middle East. It examines selected youths’ socially constructed understandings of the conflicts and violence affecting their lives, their perceptions of their roles and agency in non-violently addressing those conflicts, and the learning experiences and social pedagogies (inside and outside school) available to them that might have contributed to forming their understandings and agency. The study’s intersectional gender- and social-class-sensitive design enables an understanding of how social-structural, cultural and political dynamics interacted with participating youths’ experiences of social conflicts and their peacebuilding citizenship agency. Findings show that social conflicts that the participating youths were concerned about varied in their differing gender and social class locations. In addition, despite the disconnections between the participating students’ lived experiences of conflicts and their learning opportunities at school, the findings point to spaces of feasibility for schools to enhance students’ opportunities to develop key aspects of peacebuilding agency, even in (semi-)authoritarian settings where citizenship and peace education are absent from the explicit curriculum. Moreover, the research expands the international conceptualisation of peacebuilding agency by showing that young people’s frequent responses to the social conflicts in their lives in (semi-)authoritarian contexts (avoidance, conformity, withdrawal and despair) cannot be simply interpreted as apathy or lack of awareness of the larger structural issues.

Violent and Unethical Non-Violent Abuse of Faith and Ethnoreligious Sentiments in Southeast Europe: Religious Peace-Building?

The article presents a theoretical and conceptual examination of religious violent and unethical non-violent behaviors, ethnopolitical and clerical synergism, and religious peace-building capacity. I argue that the phenomenon of religious/ethnic violent and non-violent interchangeability adopted by national political unethical behavior has adverse consequences on the post-Yugoslav social behavior and reconciliation process; religions should be a moral peace-building agency. The multiethnic/multireligious socialist Yugoslav society has been violently transformed into influential ethical and clerical cultures, producing antagonistic ethnonational societies sustaining pastoralism as potent identity manifestations of the social capital. War-period visual violence and emotions influenced violent behavior and policy within the discourse "our vs. their sacred ethnic land," creating an unbearable ease of creating fear and motivating violent antagonism and war crimes. The post-war antagonistic media rhetoric, visual antagonism, and abuse of faith adversely impact peaceful coexistence. Ethnic, religious, ideological, and political contextual factors are challenging to generate in post-conflict, divided Balkan societies. Fear of others, religiously distinct, is a category that's difficult to determine and prevent. Western-Balkan societies possess victimological and political mythical conventions, honoring ethnoreligious war victories, defeats, and agonies, maintaining hostility and revenge discourse. Historically, religions were misused to justify violence and maintain non-violence, unethical sociopolitical order, and negative peace. The ideologies of religious superiority intertwine with intensely dominant national perceptions, so belonging to the Serb, Croat, or Bosniak people is equated with Orthodoxy, Catholicism, or Islam. This entanglement is the groundwork for despondency and a hostile peace climate. Current clerical and ethnopolitical policies lead further away from conflict transformation, directing toward the renewal of monotheistic spirituality, cognition, and violence. Political involvement affects "authentic" religion. We should engage in all-inclusive theological and consensus approaches to demonstrate that religions are peace-building agencies, retrieving and revitalizing authentic morality criteria. Religious sentiments mobilize people more rapidly than other identities.

Why ideas matter: Exploring the potential and limits of local civil society agency in peacebuilding

ABSTRACT Drawing on research conducted with a range of actors in Armenia during the aftermath of the 2020 war over Nagorno Karabakh, we examine the potential and limits of local agency peacebuilding. In examining how agency is manifested and constrained in situations of conflict, we draw on social and political theories of agency and power to consider the dialogic interplay between actors, structures and ideas. By adopting the framework of discursive institutionalism, we analyze the importance of ideas in shaping politics and policy. We argue that in the field of peacebuilding in Armenia, the agency of local civil society actors is on the one hand affected by the liberal peacebuilding paradigm advanced by international actors and on the other hand, by hegemonic State and societal discourses about the conflict. Together, these have engendered forms of disciplinary power that have led to self-censorship and reticence among civil society actors, limiting their agency in peacebuilding.

Youth Agency in Peacebuilding

AbstractMore than 600 million young people today live in economically and environmentally fragile contexts. Scholarly literature on the interconnections between these young people and religion has often portrayed them as prone to radicalization and drawn to violent extremism. Such framings, however, render invisible their potential as agents for positive change. In this article, we take a step back to consider more basic questions about the socio‐political significance of youth leadership in (inter)religious contexts for the cultivation of peace. In particular, we focus on youth, religion, and religious representations of insider and outsider “others.” In this article, we report on the youth‐focused programme Enemy, Stranger, Neighbor, Friend, aiming to contribute to understanding the complexities that youth working in conflict prevention, informal peace education, and interreligious work face and the contributions they can make.

Reparations and the politics of waiting in Kenya

ABSTRACT This article examines transitional justice in Kenya, drawing on interviews and focus groups with survivors of the post-election violence of 2007–2008. Focusing particularly on the experiences of women and internally displaced persons (IDPs), it explores how survivors understood and negotiated waiting for reparations and analyses the effects of temporal uncertainty (around timing and scope) and of inequality (in relation to waiting times). Uncertainty and inequality contributed to survivors’ senses of passivity and exacerbated their feelings of marginalisation. To delay reparations for an uncertain time contributes to senses of continuity with the past, which transitional justice precisely seeks to disrupt. However, the study also demonstrates that waiting is not only endured, but at times actively resisted or rejected, which might be understood as a claim to ownership of local peace and exercise of peacebuilding agency but also as resistance against the dominant temporality of transitional justice. By framing survivors’ experiences with the scholarship on time and power and the “politics of waiting”, the research contributes to the literature on local experiences and understandings of transitional justice and to recent debates around its temporalities.

Care and silence in women’s everyday peacebuilding in Myanmar

ABSTRACT This article draws on feminist perspectives on the everyday to explore women’s everyday experiences of peace in Kayah state in Myanmar. We locate the daily practices women engage in to maintain life and minimise violence, making visible women’s contributions to everyday peace. In addition, we examine the ways in which women are disproportionally affected by war and prevented from benefitting from post-war changes. Our findings demonstrate that practices of care and silence are key avenues for women’s everyday peacebuilding, through which women sustain peace, ensure survival, and minimise violence in their families and wider communities. At the same time, however, these practices are conditioned by and may contribute to gendered insecurity and marginalisation for women. Through this focus, our analysis shows how women’s positioning in gendered relations of power may both enable their agency in peacebuilding and reinforce their gendered inequality and marginalisation in the post-war period. We conclude that while everyday peace practices may hold the potential for positive change, these can also contribute to the reproduction of inequality, oppression and structural violence.

Social Media and Youth Peacebuilding Agency: A Case From Muslim Mindanao

This article determines how social media, along with institutional affiliation and first-hand experiences of violence, influence youth peacebuilding agency. It utilises the case of a group of university students from Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines who implemented a project that aimed to counter Islamophobia-linked hate speech online. Interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation were employed during fieldwork. The main argument is that the youth peacebuilding agency does not necessarily rest upon traditional peacebuilding structures. Rather, it lays in structural elements familiar to the youth. Access and familiarity of the youths to social media led them to use it as the platform of the project. The conceptualisation of the project was influenced by their first-hand experience of violence and Mindanao conflict. As university students, their institutional affiliation with the academia had supplemented in meeting the resources they needed. Time constraints and family relationships posed a challenge amongst the youth. The empirical findings of this research hope to contribute to studies on youth agency, peacebuilding, and development in post-conflict contexts.

Women’s Agency in Peacebuilding in Polarized Post-Conflict Communities in Plateau State, Nigeria

Over the last two decades, while significant consideration is given to women’s participation and representation in formal peacebuilding processes, there is the dearth of research on the grassroots level involvement and contributions of women to peacebuilding processes in post-conflict communities. Utilizing 28 semi-structured interviews and two focus group discussions with women in Bukuru and Gyel communities, this article aims at improving the understandings on the agency of women in building and sustaining peace in polarized post-conflict communities in Plateau State, Nigeria. The article argues that in spite of the global marginalisation of women in formal peace processes, women are actively involved in peacebuilding and use various forms of individual and collective agency to restore harmonious relations, build peace and foster social cohesion in polarized post-conflict communities.

Reframing agency in complexity-sensitive peacebuilding

This article examines how the growing complexity of peacebuilding settings is transforming the classic notion of purposeful agency into a non-purposeful, adaptive form of being in such contexts. Through an analysis of critical peacebuilding literature and a reflection on the UN’s peacebuilding practices in the field, the article first argues that complexity has been gradually replacing linear, top-down strategies with approaches seeking to draw attention to interdependencies, relationality and uncertainty. The article then suggests that engaging with complexity has critical implications for the traditional understanding of purposeful agency in the peacebuilding milieu that go beyond those of the governmentality critique, which conceptualizes the complexity turn as a strategy for extending control over post-conflict societies. Complexity is eventually conceived of in the article as a performative contextual quality that stems from the non-linear, co-emergent and unpredictable entanglement of interactions between actors in peacebuilding processes. This state of entanglement hinders the autonomous, purposeful agential condition of these actors in war-torn scenarios – in this article, peacebuilding implementers specifically – in which agency seems more and more restricted to its adaptive nature.

The perils of recognising local agency: a situational concept of agency and the case of victims of sexual violence and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

Following the so-called ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding research and efforts towards a ‘Global’ orientation in international relations (IR) scholarship, a number of authors have recently called for and proposed research approaches that recognise local actors’ agency in peacebuilding and other forms of intervention. These calls and proposals have revealed a serious lack of attention to local agency in previous research. But eagerness to recognise that which has long been wrongfully neglected also comes with new challenges. Most importantly, the emphasis on local agency runs the risk of overlooking or even misrecognising situations when and where actors feel severely limited in their possibilities and/or experience that their actions are of little or no effect. This paper develops a situational concept of agency for open-ended empirical analysis that explicitly allows for findings of severely limited or even absent agency in specific contexts. The concept’s analytical value is exemplified in an exploration of the case of victims of sexual violence and the post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone, based on recent field and archival research. Although this exploration reveals activism, individual initiative and coping strategies, these only amount to severely limited victims’ agency in the context of the TRC.

Women’s experiences of peacebuilding in violence-affected communities in Kenya

Despite the attention to gender and conflict in empirical positivist peace research, and the interest in local agency in recent peacebuilding literature, women’s understandings and lived experiences of peacebuilding are not necessarily well accounted for. This article, drawing on interviews, focus groups and observation research with 57 female victims/survivors of post-election violence in Kenya, provides an ethnographic study of women’s largely informal peacebuilding activities, ranging from mediation and dialogue to economic empowerment. It analyses women’s constructions and ways of making sense of being peacebuilders, demonstrating that, while participants employed dominant gender frames, they exerted considerable transformative agency in their communities. It argues that their ‘gendered responsibility for peace’ at community level is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. The research aims to increase understanding of the gendered nature of peacebuilding and the ways in which women exercise peacebuilding agency through a focus on their own voices and lived experiences.

Local Women's Agency In Peace Building: A Study on the Conflict of Iron Sand Mining In East Java

The local women as the agent in peace building are rare to be addressed in academic discourse. This paper seeks to analyse the roles played by local women in the conflict of iron sand mining in Wotgalih village, Lumajang regency, East Java Province. In the conflict situation, the women have already been as the backbone, carer and guard of the family replacing the roles of the men that do not function optimally. It is very clear how women played those roles by becoming farm laborers in watermelon field along Wotgalih Lumajang beach. In the post-conflict period, the women take an important role in fostering peace. They served as the spearhead for the reconciliation of the related parties.

Teachers’ perspectives on educating for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina

What does it mean to educate for peace after witnessing one’s community being devastated by war? And what impact, if any, does educating for peace have amidst the complexity of post-war reconstruction? To explore these questions, a phenomenological study was conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012 with eight ethnically diverse educators who participated in a programme of Education for Peace (EFP) which began a decade earlier in the cities of Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka and Zenica. Through semi-structured interviews, the study (1) explores meanings and experiences associated by participants with their role as post-conflict peace educators, (2) examines the extent and limits of their sense of peacebuilding agency and (3) elicits evaluations of the longer term impacts of educating for peace in the Bosnian context. The study finds that meanings associated with educating for peace are nuanced by educators’ personal histories of conflict, professional identities and the country’s wider socio-political dynamics. Benefits, risks and challenges stemming from peace education engagement are found in four domains (personal, social, educational and political). Conclusions recommend greater focus to the subjectivities of teachers in conflict-affected contexts as a key site for evaluating peacebuilding impact, for revising theories of change and improving planning and provision.

Talking Peace at the Edge of War: Local Civil Society Narratives and Reconciliation in Eastern Ukraine

Scholarly works on Ukraine conflict and its resolution tend to focus on the role of states or international organizations. Yet, more and more local civil society organizations (CSOs) are embracing reconciliation as a new agenda in the post-Euromaidan period. In this article, we analyze the role of local Ukrainian CSOs in fostering dialogue and reconciliation in Eastern Ukraine. Research on sub-state actors as legitimate agency in peacebuilding in Eastern Ukraine remains scarce. By drawing on the “everyday peace” perspective, we show that local bottom-up narratives of the conflict differ greatly from the top-down narratives of states and international organizations. Whereas the latter tend to reconfirm the status quo of the conflict or the (neo-)liberal economic approach to peace, local CSOs promote “rehumanizing the other,” which constitutes a quintessential process in achieving sustainable peace in Eastern Ukraine.

Structural Violence, Intersectionality, andJustpeace: Evaluating Women's Peacebuilding Agency in Manipur, India

The general scholarship on armed conflict in Manipur, India, ignores the experiences of women as agents. Feminist scholarship counters this tendency, revealing women's everyday responses to the violence that constrains them. However, this scholarship often fails to be intersectional, and it lauds every instance of women's agency without evaluating it in terms of its ability to build peace. Employing Kimberlé Crenshaw's underused distinction between structural and political intersectionality and Saba Mahmood's concept of agency, I analyze my field research conducted with women's peacebuilding groups in Manipur in 2014 and 2015. Using structural intersectionality, I first describe the qualitatively different experiences of women peacebuilders living at different social locations. Using political intersectionality as a normative tool, I then show that ethnic and religious hierarchies often disrupt women's attempts to build peace. Interethnic peacebuilding groups that rely on gender‐based solidarity tend to privilege the experiences of the women coming from the majority ethnic group. Other peacebuilding groups, bound by ethnicity, often distrust and resent women who come from different ethnic enclaves. I argue that women's peacebuilding agency must aim at an inclusive justpeace if it is to succeed. We should evaluate agency, rather than glorifying all instances of women's responses to violence.

The dynamic local: delocalisation and (re-)localisation in the search for peacebuilding identity

This article challenges the notion of the ‘local’ as a static identity or set position and argues for a processual understanding of localisation, in which constant processes of delocalisation and (re-)localisation serve as tools by which peacebuilding actors position themselves in the political economy and the social landscape of peacebuilding. Peacebuilding agency and -identity are viewed as situated in time and space and subject to constant transformation. Using the cases of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cyprus, I argue that the positionality of local identity is contingent on the ever-changing social context and political economy of peacebuilding. By viewing processes of (re-)localisation and delocalisation as markers of agency, we can overcome the binary between local and international and investigate more subtle forms of agency in a fluid peacebuilding environment. The article identifies the ways in which peacebuilding agency facilitates the creation of a particular set of identities (identification), before investigating the processes of delocalisation and (re-)localisation in detail. The article goes on to argue that, rather than being mutually exclusive, these two processes tend to happen in parallel and thus challenge the seemingly neat binary between local and international peacebuilding identities.

The Role of a Development Agency in Peacebuilding: Track One-and-a-Half Mediation in Mindanao

Japan’s development assistance to conflict-affected areas in Mindanao, southern Philippines, opened new pathways for the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to support multilateral peacebuilding efforts. JICA, in collaboration with Universiti Sains Malaysia, organized a series of Consolidation for Peace Seminars as Track One-and-a-Half mediations. Two aspects of Japan’s assistance to Mindanao enabled JICA to engage in peacemaking. First, Japan’s assistance to Mindanao formed a unique tripartite cooperation mechanism consisting of the International Monitoring Team, Mindanao Task Force, and Japan-Bangsamoro Initiative for Reconstruction and Development. JICA took part in all three modes of assistance. Second, providing assistance under a volatile cease-fire agreement in Mindanao motivated JICA to become involved in peacemaking outside the traditional function of development assistance.

University agency in peacebuilding: Perspectives on conflict and development in Kenya

In 2007, Kenya erupted into violence as a result of heavily contested elections. Because identity divisions lay at the heart of the conflict, the nation’s public universities were deeply impacted, at times pitting students, faculty, and staff against one another, and disrupting the ability of Kenyan higher education to contribute to the development process. This qualitative case study explores how faculty and administrators, at two public institutions in a conflict zone, understand and describe their university’s contributions to development. Analyzed through the lens of conflict transformation, the data reveal that the universities changed internal policies and practices to accommodate constituents impacted by the conflict and to cut across conflict lines, and that participants shifted in their thinking about the institution’s internal and external relationships and purposes. The article has two aims. It offers preliminary heuristics for peacebuilding as a university process, providing a framework of practices and policies that engage university constituencies and may transform conflict. It also shows how conflict changed participants’ perspectives about the relationships between themselves, higher education, and development in their country. Further, this article explores a connection between participant beliefs about peacebuilding and development in Kenya.

In search for emancipatory hybridity: the case of post-war Sierra Leone

Hybridity is increasingly becoming a common terminology in the study of contemporary peacebuilding in post-war societies. While the literature on hybridity has offered us insights into the existence of ‘local’ agency in peacebuilding as well as the limits of the liberal peace, much of the literature fails to engage with the types of hybridity that are emerging in these contexts and their implications for durable peace. Drawing on fieldwork in Sierra Leone and expanding on Robert Belloni's typology of hybridity, this article examines the types of hybridity that are emerging in post-war Sierra Leone including the possibilities of hybridity that is emancipatory or transformative. I argue that the different types of hybridity that are emerging in Sierra Leone do not necessarily lead to emancipation as some of them have failed to promote welfare, human interests and needs, as well as reinforce patron–client ties which risks creating conditions for war or instability.