Everyday Peace Research Articles

Understanding Everyday Peace in Cambodia: Plurality, Subtlety, and Connectivity

This article explores the nature of everyday peace in local communities in Cambodia. Drawing on interviews and observation and focusing on the reconstruction of relationship between community residents and former Khmer Rouge leaders, the analysis demonstrates that everyday peace in these communities is characterised by three features: plurality, subtlety, and connectivity. The findings demonstrate how the nature of social relationships with former harm-doers varies within and between communities; sheds light on the subtle, mundane, and episodic ways in which peace is sustained and manifested; and highlights the connectivity of local agency with broader political contexts that contribute to shaping everyday practices and experiences of peace. In conclusion, this article revisits the fixity and homogeneity of the peace in a society which is assumed by many studies, calls for further exploration of the prepolitical nature of everyday peace, and discusses implications for a recent academic debate over victims’ silence.

Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War. By Pamina Firchow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 158p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War. By Pamina Firchow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 158p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Tajikistan’s Atomised Peace: Approaching Conflict Management from the Ground Up

ABSTRACT By analysing constitutive everyday peace practices, the article shows that poor socio-economic conditions, rather than political grievances and aspirations, are major sources of an actual and potential discontent in present day Tajikistan. It is argued that peace is atomised in a way that it is upheld through state withdrawal from welfare provision and an ongoing, ever more deepening fragmentation of the social fabric in the context of the precarity accompanying the country’s integration into the global political economy after the Soviet collapse and the subsequent civil war (1992–97). Nevertheless, individuals themselves navigate, domesticate and mitigate conflicts from the ground up.

Spaces and Institutional Logics in Post-Conflict Settings of Mitrovica

ABSTRACT Spaces structure interactions between communities in post-conflict settings. They are governed by particular institutional logics, which can foster boundary building and boundary transgression. This article proposes an extended version of the concept of ‘everyday peace’ including a focus not only on micro-level individual actorness in social interactions but also on an important meso-level dimension in the analysis of social behaviour and variation in institutional logics governing spaces where social interactions take place. We apply these concepts to the study of perceptions and practices around bridges in Mitrovica in Kosovo.

Introduction: Below Peace Agreements: Everyday Nationalism or Everyday Peace?

Introduction: Below Peace Agreements: Everyday Nationalism or Everyday Peace?

Everyday peace capture: Nationalism and the dynamics of peace after violent conflict

AbstractNationalism is arguably one of the most detrimental peace‐breaking factors in conflict‐affected societies. This article examines how ethno‐nationalist elites, subterranean movements, and ordinary people can become blockages to sustainable peace and reconciliation after violent conflict. It argues that peacebuilding and state‐building imposed from outside as conflict transformation approaches without acceptable peace settlement and resolute solution of the disputes among parties in conflict risk enabling the co‐optation of power‐sharing arrangements by ethno‐nationalist elites, contestation of peace and reconciliation by subterranean mono‐ethnic movements, and the occurrence of vernacular peace‐breaking acts. This negative mutation of nationalism not only harms peace, justice, and development but also undermines the rights and needs of distinct identity groups. Under these conditions, escaping the nationalism trap in conflict‐affected societies requires seeking political change through post‐ethnic politics and reconciliation through everyday pacifist acts undertaken by the affected communities themselves. The article draws on Kosovo to illustrate empirically the dynamics of peace‐breaking and practices of everyday nationalism. It seeks to bridge debates on nationalism and post‐conflict peacebuilding and offer alternative pathways for rethinking strategies of peace in divided societies.

World Peace Is Local Peace

AbstractToday we live in a world where the majority of wars are no longer interstate, a development that over the last few decades has often left the international community, in particular the United Nations as it was originally conceived, ill equipped to respond. The nimble action required for contemporary conflict resolution and peacebuilding now primarily lies in the hands of local actors and states, sometimes supported by international actors. But it is not always clear who these local actors are or what they need in order to achieve sustainable peace. As part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” this essay looks in more detail at what we mean by “local” in conflict-affected contexts and asks how local is local enough when resolving conflicts and building peace. It identifies tensions and concerns such as the need for the international community to have a well-defined and easily identified “local agenda” when, in reality, there are often several competing local agendas. The essay presents the Everyday Peace Indicators project as a vehicle that can be used to help communicate these local needs to international actors, and argues for the importance of understanding people's perceived realities in addition to, if not more than, their actual realities when trying to understand peace and conflict trends. In order to do this, we need to more effectively problematize peacebuilding for positive conflict disruption.

Assessing Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) in Tandi and Padampur Areas in Chitwan, Nepal

Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) measures the community level indicators of peace and strategies developed to ensure long lasting peace not only in the level of individuals and community but towards achieving broader goal of the country. Realizing significance of grass root level indicators, in academic discourse and policy formulation, this article centered on the accepted wisdom of peace by wide ranges of people with their experiences, feelings and aspirations, which is summarized as everyday indicators. This core focus of this article is EPI, which is based on people's testimony collected in May 2017 in two communities of Chitwan district of Nepal. Summarizing the common aspirations of people, political stability, security, peace and access to basic needs are considered as common indicators of everyday peace among individuals participated in research process. Also, the freedom from fear, involvement in income generating activities and ownership of property in the name of women, adequate job opportunities and access to basic services; i.e. health, education, transportation and alcohol free environment in communities, religious and cultural freedom, harmony among the people in communities were identified as common indicators of peace.

Post-war memorialisation as everyday peace? Exploring everyday (dis-) engagements with the Maoist martyrs’ gate of Beni Bazaar in Nepal

ABSTRACTThe academic debates on post-war memorialisation and everyday peace tend to appear in relative isolation from one another. Yet, there is arguably much to gain from integrating them, by exploring how – and to what effect – post-war monuments are incorporated into everyday life. To this end, this article studies the everyday interactions that residents of Beni Bazaar, Nepal, have developed in relation to the recently erected Maoist martyrs’ gate. As such, narrative ellipsis, local co-operation and popular culture are identified as three distinct ways in which the gate has become entangled with everyday life in the city. I argue that these everyday interactions represent inherently political acts, which in subtle ways serve to destabilise the politically divisive ‘message’ of the post-war monument. Hence, it makes sense to think of these everyday interactions as a form of bottom-up peace-building in their own right – albeit to varying degrees.

Veteran masculinities and audiovisual popular music in post-conflict Croatia: a feminist aesthetic approach to the contested everyday peace

ABSTRACTIn Croatia, campaigners for a more critical public reckoning with the memory of Croatia's 'Homeland War' (1991–5) and the national past confront embeddings of hegemonic myths of the war into everyday life. Among these are the stardom of a musician whose 'patriotic' music claims the same moral authority as the Croatian veterans' movement and whose public persona has embodied militarised masculinity since he became a wartime star. Popular music and youth engagement with it is thus among the sites where everyday understandings of peace are being contested. By exploring the audiovisual aesthetics of the song/video through which this musician re-engaged with veterans' activism in 1998, and showing that popular music spectatorship seeps into the everyday micropolitics of young people building and contesting peace, the paper argues that for critical peace and conflict studies to understand the affective politics of post-conflict masculinities, they must combine a feminist and aesthetic consciousness.

Care as everyday peacebuilding

ABSTRACTAnalyses of everyday peace provide a critical response to existing peace practices. However, absent from these discussions is the feminist research that theorizes peace through everyday practices of care. We argue that contemporary debates on everyday peace should engage with this largely forgotten tradition. We explore the contributions of this research through case studies that span the north-south divide: from Northern Ireland to Aceh, and Kashmir to Reykjavik. Demonstrating how care is an essential ingredient of everyday peace, we suggest that a care lens allows us to reframe the understanding of everyday peace to provide a fuller picture that also addresses the complex and contradictory nature of social relations involved in everyday peacebuilding. By resolving conflicts over immediate care needs and building the capacity of communities in ways that subtly challenge the fixity of conflict, care cumulatively creates possibilities for peaceful transformation.

Building peace through systemic compassion

More than an individual emotion experienced by conflict resolution practitioners, compassion constitutes a primary norm of the field of peacebuilding. Three domains of peacebuilding practice are showcased: first, the human rights agenda of the United Nations, second, the practices of everyday peace, and third, the strategies among professionals of interactive conflict resolution. Motivated by the compassion‐related programs in these domains, we propose that peacebuilders develop strategies that are intended to foster compassion among the conflict parties. The notion of systemic compassion is introduced and illustrated with examples within current practice.

Circuits, the everyday and international relations: Connecting the home to the international and transnational

The primary aim of this article is methodological. It proposes circuitry as an analytical device – not a mere metaphor – as a way of connecting the everyday and the hyper-local to the national, international, transnational and all levels in between. Thus, the article is concerned with international relations’ perennial levels of analysis problem. The study is prompted by empirical research from the Everyday Peace Indicators project in which research subjects narrated their own (in)security in terms of the home and the immediate vicinity of the home. The home can be regarded as a key part of everyday and ontological security for many people, but how do we connect this to the international and transnational? The article draws on the literature on engineered and biological circuits in order to propose a novel analytical device with which to emphasise the connectivity between apparently unconnected levels. A life history is used to illustrate how the analytical device might be operationalised.

Agroecology as a Practice-Based Tool for Peacebuilding in Fragile Environments? Three Stories from Rural Zimbabwe

This paper investigates how transformative agroecology may contribute to the critical reframing of social–ecological relationships, and how this might in turn create a foundation for bottom-up peace formation in fragile environments, within which rural communities are often habituated to conditions of control, violence and mistrust that drive social division. Here, we consider the value of social farming in reforging relationships through which social–ecological change may be negotiated and alternative sources of agency and identity may be cultivated in order to transcend entrenched patterns of division. Three case studies are presented, drawing on primary data from participatory action research with farming communities in Zimbabwe that also consider the differential attitudes and experiences of agroecological and conventional farmers. The study finds that, where agroecological farmers were exposed to more plural ways of thinking, being and acting together, levels of autonomy from coercive structures were increasing, as were both a sense of efficacy and optimism to effect social–ecological change. This was particularly pronounced where collective processes to shape physical landscapes were forging bonds of solidarity, reciprocity and trust. In these cases, agroecological farmers were increasingly able to envisage a future together shaped by collective endeavour, evidenced by changing attitudes and relationships with one another and their environment. The paper explores the extent to which farmers in each location were able to instrumentalise resilience and agency for everyday peace, and the variances found according to historical context and local power dynamics that represent barriers to change.

Cooperation and Co-Existence Between Farmers and Herders in the Midst of Violent Farmer-Herder Conflicts in Ghana

Abstract:Despite periodic violent conflict between farmers and Fulani herders in many parts of Ghana, cooperative relations between them remain strong. They are “cultural neighbors” who cooperate both in times of violent conflict and during periods of no conflict. Cooperation between them is expressed through everyday interactions, cattle entrustment, resource sharing, trade, friendship, intermarriages, visitations, exchanges, communal labor, and social solidarity. Borrowing from theorizations of cultural neighborhood and everyday peace, this paper uses specific case studies from Northern and Southern Ghana to illustrate the enactment of cooperation between herders and farmers in areas of violent farmer-herder conflict.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

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.

The politics of everyday peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

Liberal peacebuilding strategies have brought a semblance of peace to many post-accord societies. However, these strategies have fallen short, unable to create a sustainable peace or to overcome divisions at the societal level. The ‘in-betweeness’ that lingers within the war-to-peace transition for many of these societies continues to persist decades after peace agreements have been signed, constraining and shaping the possibilities for bottom-up peacebuilding. Through the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, I aim to generate an account of everyday peace politics that allows for the representation of inclusionary, exclusionary and ambivalent practices of ordinary citizens. I treat the everyday as political in order to explore the ways in which ordinary citizens are active and engaged in shaping the type of peace that emerges. I highlight that local practices are neither progressive nor regressive, but rather reflect the different attempts of citizens to navigate the uncertainty of the incomplete war-to-peace transitions.

Top-down and bottom-up narratives of peace and conflict

Based on findings from the Everyday Peace Indicators project, the article considers how top-down and bottom-up narratives and understandings of conflict often differ. The article posits that top-down narratives are often the result of a peculiar framing system that imposes imaginaries on conflicts and those experiencing them. The bottom-up narratives, based on research in South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe, show that localised perceptions of peace, safety and security are not only articulated in different ways to top-down narratives but also raise different issues.

The everyday peace project: an innovative approach to peace pedagogy

A critical task for peace pedagogy is to challenge views of peace as primarily responses to declared war. Crisis-based politics tend to focus on exceptional situations and fail to capture the entire spectrum of violence. Premised on the idea that peace cannot be understood in isolation of larger structural problems, this paper proposes the concept of ‘everyday peace’ as a framework for peace education. Drawing from a pedagogical initiative, we examine how students engage with the concept of everyday peace and present our findings in three related domains: (1) definition of everyday peace, (2) application of everyday peace principles and (3) role of collaboration in everyday peace approaches. Our analysis underscored two important themes in participants’ definitions of everyday peace: (1) peace as a value-based praxis and (2) individual-level and systemic components of everyday peace. Applying these principles to a violent event in the local community, participant responses emphasized compassion, cultures of peace and the need to draw reflexive, meaningful connections between local and global contexts. The participants also outlined the synergistic role of collaboration in everyday peacebuilding. We discuss our findings in relation to extant research and consider implications of an everyday peace framework for holistic peace education.