Everyday Peace Research Articles

‘We are creating peace’: everyday peace practices of displaced women in Kenya and Germany

ABSTRACT This article explores how displaced women contribute to everyday peace in exile. While research debates largely focus on the nexus of conflict and displacement, peace and specifically displaced women’s peace practices have been widely overlooked. Drawing on Mac Ginty’s concept of everyday peace and Lister’s approach to agency, the array of practices displaced women use to foster everyday peace in their immediate environments in Kenya and Germany are examined. The findings reflect how they leverage their agency both individually and collectively in seeking to establish, sustain and reinstate peaceful conditions despite and indeed due to oftentimes precarious conditions in exile. They actively get out of dangerous situations in search for everyday peace in exile and get by challenges through establishing a form of peaceful normalcy. They further employ collective strategies in getting organised to contribute to peace and engage with activism to get back at injustices and restrictions.

Obliged tolerance: Power at the intersection of everyday peace and the intervention economy

This article explores the economic relationships of host and refugee communities in the context of international humanitarian interventions and their implications for everyday peace. It argues for an expanded understanding of power in everyday peace, incorporating an analysis of the interplay between international interventions, local power dynamics and everyday peace. It responds to the call for increased attention to the economic dimensions of peacebuilding, particularly at the local level. The article introduces the concept of obliged tolerance to explain some of the socioeconomic motivations for different actors in the intervention economy to engage in everyday peace processes. Those benefitting from the international intervention actuate less empowered community members to practice tolerance for peaceful coexistence which sustains the economic benefits derived from the intervention economy. The findings from research conducted in Lebanon indicate that humanitarian interventions shape a peace that primarily benefits affluent and influential actors, while marginalised individuals engage in everyday peace for survival and to pursue socioeconomic opportunities. By integrating an analysis of everyday economic interactions, this article highlights the role of power dynamics and economic motivations based on obliged tolerance in shaping everyday peace, challenging conventional notions of everyday peace as a social coping mechanism that people practice entirely voluntarily.

Navigating Spaces of Everyday Peace and Violence: Societal Protest, Care, and Solidarity in Post-18O Chile

ABSTRACT Social justice protests that began on 18 October 2019 in Chile were greeted enthusiastically around the globe. The mobilisation ‘woke up’ society and contributed to the collective drafting of a new constitution for the country. Building on ethnographic insights gathered in January–February 2020, this paper analyses forms of violence together with relations of care and solidarity that emerged within the mobilisation. It walks the reader through central Santiago de Chile and discusses the praxis of conducting research in a non-war conflict site, embedded in relations of claiming space (both figuratively and concretely) and creating practices that contribute to greater social justice. Simultaneously, they are enmeshed with manifold forms of violence that need to be addressed for peace to become possible. This paper seeks to contribute to debates on the entangled forms of everyday peace and violence, drawing on feminist research and connecting these with critical geographies of peace.

Scaling research and practice of scholarships impact for peace: The role of theory

The scope of appraising international higher education scholarships’ potential impact on peace should be broadened beyond assessing their contribution to technical recovery and development. Extant research often limits appreciation of this contribution to instrumentalist terms of human capital import, underpinning it with a view of ‘peace’ as a flat phenomenon of technical functions in a neoliberal order. I present here an alternative approach for fuller and more critical examination of scholarships’ potential impact on peace in Palestine. Working within critical realism, I collected qualitative data from 32 Palestinian alumni on their master's scholarship experiences, which I then analyzed in a data-driven, descriptive mode followed by abductive analysis. Descriptive and inferential findings developed from this two-stage analysis demonstrate that the participants’ perceived academic, career, and identity developments relate to peace in Palestine in deeper, more complex ways than advancing career progress and human-sourcing higher education recovery. Interpreted through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of everyday peace capability, these perceived developments suggest that scholarships enhanced the participants’ ability to reposition themselves in relation not only to conflict but also to a reflexive agenda of individual-national progress, enabled their transgression of oppressive forces disciplining their national and global connections, and expanded their capacity for working with advanced methods of knowing. These findings illustrate the significant role that critical interdisciplinary theorization can play in developing fuller, context-informed understanding of the impact of scholarships and of international academic mobility more broadly. While these findings demonstrate only micro-level effects, i.e., impact on individuals, they have clear implications for scaling research and practice of scholarships impact for peace at the meso- and macro-levels.

Reimagining Public Safety: Defining “Community” in Participatory Research

In the context of a national movement to defund police departments, many American cities are starting to reimagine public safety, as activists demand new practices that maintain safety while minimizing harm, as well as ensuring accountability when harms occur. Drawing on Everyday Peace Indicators methodologies, we argue that “community-centered” measurement, combined with researcher-practitioner partnerships, can help move both researchers and policymakers toward a more meaningful approach to policy design and evaluation. However, the application of community-centered measurement to the context of American policing raises important theoretical and practical concerns—in particular, the question of how community is defined, and who gets to define it. In this article, we ask: how do we define “community” in participatory research contexts where the concept of community is overlapping and contested? Using the example of a recent study carried out in the City of Oakland, we illustrate the complexities of applying a community-centered measurement process to the case of public safety and, more broadly, to police reform in American cities. We conclude with a discussion of both the benefits and limitations of our own approach, as well as a set of considerations for those engaging in participatory research.

Beyond peace: Media encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians as a new potential for connection in the face of violent conflict

Peace is usually studied by looking at nation-states. Recently, peace scholars have become interested in peace found in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I argue that media scholars can contribute to this effort because they are well-equipped to capture fleeting manifestations of everyday peace. However, the problematic legacy of peace in Israel/Palestine necessitates a different conceptual framework. I highlight encounters in and through media between Israeli Jews and Palestinians and contend that they present opportunities for constructive dialogue. I demonstrate this point by analyzing the Israeli television show Arab Labor, focusing on its production process, and the plight of Jewish and Palestinian characters on the show. By fusing text and context, I suggest that media do not persuade people to believe in peace; instead, media encounters, both on and off the screen, function as cultural forums for discussing complex issues undergirding violent conflicts.

CSOs working for peace through education in conflict‐affected areas: The case of Cyprus

AbstractThis article discusses the results of a qualitative study examining the ways civil society organisations (CSOs) may better support grass‐roots initiatives for everyday peacebuilding via education in conflict‐affected societies, where official state processes have failed. Our research is set in the Cyprus context, where the conflict between the Greek‐Cypriot and Turkish‐Cypriot communities that has led to the division of the island seems rather ‘intractable’ and ‘frozen’. From the process of the analysis, three thematic categories emerged: (a) cultivating citizen empowerment and civil initiatives; (b) enhancing children's and youth's voices; and (c) launching partnerships with state and societal actors. We discuss our findings under the framework of intercultural education and change. It is argued that for peacebuilding to flourish, CSOs should use education to cultivate social and sympathetic imagination by enabling people from both communities to imagine other, more socially just, but also socio‐economically better, alternatives to the current status quo, through everyday peace and education initiatives.

Disruptive hope: the communal repertoires of violence resistance in Cúcuta

ABSTRACT This paper looks at the micro-politics of crime disorder and everyday peacebuilding in Colombia and Venezuela’s contested urban systems, particularly Cúcuta. Despite being plagued with crime, Cúcuta is also a space of hope where resilience and coexistence shape the survival strategies of thousands of marginalised people who transit or live in this contested city. Focusing on how residents, including immigrants, navigate informality and crime at the street and neighbourhood level, this study contributes to the emerging literature on how people resist criminal governance in violently contested cities by exploring the overlap between violent crime and everyday peace practices. Notably, it examines how mobility restrictions, and contested informalities come into play in places where social order is bargained between non-state armed groups and the state. Building on Urban Criminology and Peace Studies, I show how communities navigate and resist violence and crime in a violently contested city.

Everyday peace in the Ninewa Plains, Iraq: Culture, rituals, and community interactions

Although the need for local ownership of peacebuilding is routinely emphasized, the importance and the modalities of engaging with local cultures and traditions are not adequately understood, and the peacebuilding potential of local customs remains largely unharnessed. Drawing on extensive interviews with community leaders (n94) and farmers and villagers (n107), and using a conceptual framework that combines notions of the everyday and events that mark a rupture with the everyday, this article explores the opportunities that local people’s everyday interactions, culture, and traditions offer for peacebuilding in post-Islamic State Ninewa Plains, Iraq. In doing so, the article makes a theoretical contribution to the everyday peace literature by further developing existing typologies of everyday acts and attitudes of everyday peace. Demonstrating how everyday acts and attitudes of peace sit on a scale with negative peace on the one end and positive peace on the other, the article introduces the concept of ‘affinity’ on the positive peace side of the scale, to refer to an affective engagement with the other and to acts of getting to know, understand, and participate in what is important to the other community.

Artesanos de Paz: Promoting Everyday Peace-building among Children and Youth through a Participatory Theatre-based Intervention in Colombia: Lessons for Northern Ireland

Abstract There is increasing attention being drawn from the literature to build peace from the ground up. Critical studies expose the inadequacies of liberal peace regimes advocating for an everyday peace in the peacebuilding regime. Peacebuilding is future orientated and thus calls for a focus on children and youth in the research. Qualitative, participatory, arts-based methods allow for creativity, hope, and change for the future. This article presents qualitative data from 75 children and youth between the ages of 7 and 18 across three urban settings in the post conflict state of Colombia, highlighting potential implications for Northern Ireland 25 years on from the Good Friday Agreement.

Contested Spaces and Everyday Peace Politics in Northern Ireland

Abstract In 2022, the United Kingdom downgraded the security threat in Northern Ireland from “severe” to “substantial”, first set in 2010. The latter means that an attack is likely but not highly likely. For many analysts and political observers, the twenty-five years of peace that followed the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (B/GFA) though interspersed with periods of political stalemate, have led to an overall external sense the conflict has ended. This downgrading of the security threat in Northern Ireland appears to confirm this sense of a settled peace. Still, the type of peace that has been achieved, and particularly the political dynamics regarding contentious spatial issues, continue to shape the quality of peace experienced by the local population. In turn, it is precisely this everyday quality of peace that reflects the real success, or failure, of various peacebuilding efforts as such practices produce the empirical evidence of sustainable reconciliation or continue sectarian divisions in a post-conflict space.

Navigating Dahiyeh, negotiating everyday peace: mediation practices across Beirut’s Southern Suburbs

ABSTRACT How do ‘ordinary’ residents in violently contested cities navigate everyday conflict? Who do they turn to and how do they induce more powerful actors to step in and resolve their conflicts? How do socio-spatial structures shape everyday mediation practices? And what do these practices tell us about the constructive potential of cities? To explore the duality of destruction and construction in contested cities, we draw on fieldwork conducted across Beirut’s Southern Suburbs (Dahiyeh), bringing it into dialogue with a Bourdieusian framework to analyse residents’ experiences of informal mediation as everyday urban peace practices. While these practices are shaped by Dahiyeh’s particular context, they speak to practices in other urban contexts, in both the Global North and Global South. We make theoretical contributions by bringing the everyday peace and urban peacebuilding literatures together and contributing to their vernacular, spatial and practice turns, and by developing a spatialised subaltern reading of Bourdieu.

Photography and everyday peacebuilding. Examining the impact of photographing everyday peace in Colombia

ABSTRACT Arts-based peacebuilding has gained attention, but evidence and research of its impact is fragmented and, in particular, the relationship between photography and peace is underexplored. This article examines photovoice as a tool for supporting everyday and community peace in conflict-affected communities. It identifies four ways that everyday peace indicator photovoice projects in Colombia bolstered community peace: by engendering healing, building territorial identity, enabling intergenerational dialogue, and catalysing action. These impacts emerged as photovoice built on enabling factors, extending existing community peacebuilding capacities, concerns and interventions. Reflecting on the constraints and tensions around working with photography in security-sensitive environments, we propose that participatory photography makes up a vital component of the peace photography genre. We argue that the careful, strategic harnessing of photovoice, and the visualisation of everyday peace, creates opportunities for raising the voices of conflict-affected communities, building shared imaginaries and nurturing dialogue, healing and action.

Everyday peace in a ‘post‐conflict’ African metropolis: Radio encounters, indeterminacy, fugitivity

AbstractDrawing on the ethnography of a multi‐ethnic local radio listeners' club in post‐war Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, the article provides an original account of everyday peace in an African metropolis. It bridges peace geographies and African urban studies to document the informal and often invisibilised practices through which residents re‐make the city in the wake of war. In doing so, the article expands existing understandings of everyday peace while reaffirming the concept's radical, decolonial proposition: to seek peace in subaltern lifeworlds, rather than in institutional and interventionist programmes that too often reproduce violent power asymmetries. Through the story of the UFARA listeners' club, emerging out of radio encounters, the article shows how everyday peace articulates a response to different forms of conjunctural and structural violence, including precarity and territorial control. It also points to indeterminacy and fugitivity as lived, affective and political figurations of peace which, while eschewing the trappings of resistance, nonetheless point to the need to imagine peace otherwise.

The Social Entities of Folklore as Everyday Peace: A Participatory Playback Theater Research

The present work explores the interweaving of folklore with two scenes from participatory playback theater research, conducted with individuals in migration at the La Roseraie integration center in Geneva, Switzerland. It assesses folklore’s prominence to create conditions for everyday peace. Notably, this research sought to explore how we collectively narrate and enact our unofficial knowledge about the world, whereby everyday peace emerges. Often unquestioned and taken for granted, everyday peace takes shape through performing, imagining and experimenting with social frames and meanings. These collective reflections offer alternative, yet fundamental ways of establishing and communicating personal and collective peace, whereby broadly developing creative conflict cultures. Therefore, this article demonstrates the social significance of creative processes which evoke a deeply rooted folklore capability to unite individual differences in social commonalities and relations.

Conflict sensitivity/Do No Harm (DNH) through an everyday peace lens: analysing a Rohingya–Rakhine program in Myanmar

ABSTRACT This paper examines conflict-sensitivity/DNH through the lens of everyday peace. It draws on data from a local non-government organisation program working on development and peacebuilding between Rohingya Muslim and Rakhine Buddhist communities in Rakhine State, Myanmar. That program is framed around the everyday peace concept, the social practices commonly adopted by ordinary people as they seek to get on with daily life in ways that minimise risk, and perhaps work to deepen inter-communal relationships. Everyday peace thus has obvious overlaps with the DNH concept of “local capacities for peace” (LCPs). This paper analyses this program to make several contributions to the understanding of conflict-sensitivity from this framework, including expanded conceptions of LCPs and new warnings of potential harm inherent in what are often perceived as LCPs, unless power imbalances are concurrently addressed. These findings aim to improve conflict-sensitivity/DNH practice.

Understanding Cypriot youth views on peace: bottom-up experiences of everyday peace

ABSTRACT Youth views and their engagement within practices of everyday peace(building) are paramount to fostering peace, despite the deadlocks at the elite level negotiations. This article provides a bottom-up approach that recognizes the agency and potency of youth in ‘everyday peace’ by providing a voice to marginalized Cypriot youth. The semi-structured interview findings highlight that the views that Cypriot youth harbour on peace diverge from elite views and focus on societal and practical needs. Accordingly, Cypriot youth’s understanding of peace converges around three interrelated main themes – social cohesion, no discrimination and hatred, and unrestricted freedom of movement – based on frequency in expansive series of youth interviews. This article argues that youth’s priorities and responses bespeak their meaningful contributions to peace through their everyday actions.

The Power of Voice: Storytelling as Peacebuilding in Post-Troubles Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland peace process has been long and tumultuous, yet 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, peace has not become a reality for many Northern Irish citizens. For those who have been excluded from the state and the institution-led peace process, grassroots methods of peacebuilding are needed to create an everyday peace that is owned by and includes all Northern Irish citizens. A narrative approach to peacebuilding is one that addresses many of the challenges to everyday peace following the “Troubles.” By exploring the use and impact of storytelling and narrative on everyday experiences, the narrative approach proves to be a viable tool for elevating and giving ownership of the peace process to marginalized members of Northern Irish society.

Everyday peace as a theory to explain victims’ peacemaking actions in intimate partner violence situations

This paper assesses the transferability of the concept of everyday peace, developed in the conflict and peace studies literature, to practices utilised by people experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV). The relevance of everyday peace to IPV is assessed by mapping typologies of the concept against behaviour that victims implement to manage and survive abusive relationships. To collect these data, experienced family violence practitioners were asked to recount practice-based information about everyday strategies that victims use to avoid triggering or to de-escalate a perpetrator, thereby minimising immediate harm coming to themselves or others. Theming these behaviours against typologies of everyday peace demonstrated the significant relevance of this theory to IPV. As such, we suggest that everyday peace is a useful conceptual framework to apply to family violence. Our analysis finds that the everyday peace framework is particularly helpful for exploring victim agency in these contexts, reframing mundane and everyday strategies as agentic. In addition, everyday peace offers a means for better understanding victims’ actions, which could help develop more effective service responses supporting choice and agency in IPV situations.

Locating the Short Circuit: Everyday Peace as a Conduit for Conflict Disruption

Locating the Short Circuit: Everyday Peace as a Conduit for Conflict Disruption