International Peacebuilding Research Articles

Local Knowledges in International Peacebuilding: Acquisition, Filtering, and Systematic Bias

Local Knowledges in International Peacebuilding: Acquisition, Filtering, and Systematic Bias

Women, peace and insecurity: The risks of peacebuilding in everyday life for women in Sri Lanka and Nepal.

Truth telling processes, initiatives to prosecute war-time perpetrators, and ex-combatant reintegration are examples of common peacebuilding practices after war. Yet, little is known of how women are affected by peacebuilding initiatives such as these, or how they perceive these initiatives for peace. For many women, peace after war does not bring peace to everyday life; research shows that domestic violence increases during and after war. In addition, some peacebuilding measures have been found to increase risk and insecurity, not least for women. To better understand the interconnections between gender and post-conflict attitudes to peacebuilding, we asked 2,041 women and men in Sri Lanka and Nepal of their views on post-war peace initiatives. In line with our expectations, we find that women are more skeptical than men towards peacebuilding measures that involve increased risk in everyday life, such as truth-telling and coexisting with former adversaries and warring groups reintegrating in local communities. There are no gender differences pertaining to peacebuilding initiatives that take place far away at the national level, for example, concerning accountability or, in the case of Nepal, the peace agreement. Our findings suggest that international peacebuilding practice is blind to the everyday insecurities of women after war. That a basic gendered lens is missing from most peacebuilding designs is both alarming and deeply troubling, but identifying this critical aspect provides the opportunity for imperative change. By shedding light on the challenges women face after war, we hope this article contributes to finding ways to mitigate unknown and unintended side-effects of peacebuilding efforts, and thereby to the development of better, evidence-based peacebuilding practice-of benefit to both men and women.

The Existence of Mercenaries in Terms of Their Implications for The Fragility of International Peace-Building

This study aims to determine the development / history of the use of mercenaries from time to time, to explain the existence of mercenaries in relation to Private Military Companies (PMC), to determine the implications of the existence of mercenaries on the fragility of international peace-building. As for the results of this study 1). that the mercenary has existed for a long time, in the early Roman empire known the terms Balearic Slingers and Agean Bowmen. In medieval Germany there were known as Landsknechts. In America at the time of the revolution it was called Hessian and in Italy it was called Condottieri. The presence of mercenaries in the past generally originated from the desire of Kings in western countries to form a formidable and large army. However, this requires a large cost. Hence the Kings of Europe at that time, around the 15th-16th centuries, such as the Kings of France, Italy, England, the Netherlands and Switzerland, 2). that mercenaries are not identified with Private Military Company. PMCs do not meet the mercenaries criteria as provided for in Article 47 of the 1977 Protocol. The PMC is as civilian, the PMC is not assigned to fight in armed conflict, is not integrated in the armed forces of the state and does not hold a continuous combat function and thus is not eligible to participate directly in hostilities on behalf of the parties to the conflict, as required to categorize a person as a combatant, 3). That the distribution of mercenaries in various armed conflicts can imply that the existence of mercenaries can threaten world peace --- the fragility of peace-building. Regardless of the debate over legal status, entitled/not entitled, active or passive position in the field and so on

‘Undivided’ city in a divided society: explaining the peaceful coexistence of Albanians and Serbs in Kamenicë/Kamenica, Kosovo

ABSTRACT The goal of this paper is to examine which factors have influenced interethnic relations between Albanians and Serbs in Kamenicë/Kamenica, which is significantly less hostile compared to other towns in Kosovo. Utilizing a multi-method research approach, we find these factors include historical-demographic, geopolitical, institutional, economic and cultural factors, as well as the work of the members of the international peacebuilding and peacekeeping missions deployed in the municipality of Kamenicë/Kamenica in June of 1999. Based on our findings, the concept of local-local hybridization is proposed as the main theoretical contribution to the theory of hybrid peace. This concept entails long-lasting interactions between ethnic groups in a local (post-conflict) community under different social circumstances and factors that affected their coexistence, whereby this must be supported by peacebuilding and peacekeeping activities adapted to the aforementioned concept if peace is to be sustained.

Methodology of the excluded: conspiracy as discourse in the eastern DRC

ABSTRACT This article seeks to theorise the importance of locally produced narratives of conflict and peacekeeping which can be used to diversify our understanding of conflict. These narratives are often dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ by international peacebuilders and disregarded as ‘unverifiable’ by researchers. But the people who articulate these narratives often have extensive lived experience of conflict. Consequently, they demonstrate sophisticated informal theorising, resistance to malevolent power, and experience-led knowledge in their narratives. Engaging more seriously with these narratives can, therefore, make important contributions to our understandings. Drawing on narratives and stories collected over more than a decade of interview-based and ethnographic field research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article shows how conspiracy narratives can be analytically useful in questioning the powerful and enduring logics of international intervention and reveal important yet oft-ignored aspects of peacebuilding failure that need to be addressed if peace is to succeed.

A self-fulfilling prophecy? Constructions of youth-as-troublemakers in UN DDR processes

Youth as a category that informs international interventions in conflict-affected settings has gained currency in the past decade. This article traces the rising rhetoric of youth in UN Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) discourse and demonstrates how changes in its dominant representations have implications beyond the matter of semantics. Drawing on post-structuralist traditions, the article highlights how the DDR discourse delineates problems through particular framings that call forth certain solutions, which in turn reinforce the very (mis)understandings that underlie the interventions. A case study from the Central African Republic illustrates how the hegemonic representation of youth-as-troublemakers in UN documents, together with a compelling narrative that naturalized the link between youth, unemployment and violence, made possible and conferred legitimacy to the proliferation of projects with an overwhelming economic focus. The article discusses how the resource landscape, such as opportunities to unlock earmarked funding, incentivizes the reproduction of certain constructions of youth that align with today’s policy panic around violent extremism. In so doing, it puts into question the instrumental approach towards discourse by pointing to surprising ways in which discourses become appropriated by both international peacebuilders and the ‘subjects’ of these interventions.

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

Post-growth peacebuilding

Abstract Economic development is considered one of the pillars of international peacebuilding. The mandates of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations often contain the promotion of economic growth as a prerequisite for post-conflict recovery and sustainable peace. However, the relationship between peace and economic growth needs re-examination in light of urgent calls for global sustainability and climate action. To do this, I first review the claims and critiques that economic growth is a precondition for peace. I then revisit past peacebuilding cases where the promotion of economic growth has either corresponded with or led to environmental degradation and unequal distribution of resources, contributing to new or renewed forms of violence. Finally, I explore the prospects of post-growth peacebuilding based on recent efforts to make UN peacekeeping operations more attuned to environmental considerations and the changing climate. Post-growth peacebuilding is not just about reducing the environmental footprint of peacekeeping; it is, more importantly, about breaking away from the linear and growth-driven path of peace and development towards intergenerational and ecological justice.

Building Peace after Self-Determination and Partition: Faulty Assumptions?

Abstract Since the 1990s, scholars have debated whether partition, the most radical solution to ethnic conflicts, promotes peace or not. Drawing on the peacebuilding and war recurrence literature, I contribute to this debate by theorizing reasons that newly independent states emerging from partition are likely to suffer from new conflicts between former pro-independence allies. At the domestic level, former pro-independence groups, assumed to be a unitary actor by partition proponents, are likely to fragment as their unity was based on achieving the goal of independence. Furthermore, newly independent states tend to suffer from very weak institutions, and citizens develop strong frustrations toward their new states because their unrealistically high expectations are unmet. At the international level, international peacebuilders tend to wrongly assume that the unity within the pro-independence camp will last after independence and that the pro-independence people are essentially “good guys.” As a result, they often misunderstand the post-conflict political dynamics of new states, which reduces the effectiveness of their peacebuilding efforts. My arguments are illustrated through analyzing why Timor-Leste and South Sudan, the closest to typical partition cases in the twenty-first century, faced the 2006 Crisis and the 2013 Civil War, respectively.

Mothers at peace: International peacebuilding and post-conflict fertility

A considerable body of empirical evidence indicates that conflict affects reproductive behaviour, often resulting in an increased fertility rate due to higher child mortality and limited access to healthcare services. However, we know much less about the effect of peace in a post-conflict setting. This study explores how the external provision of security affects fertility by focusing on the UN intervention in Liberia. We combine DHS birth history data with information on road distance to UN military compounds and find that women living in the proximity of peacekeepers have lower fertility rates in the deployment period. This is due to parents prioritizing quality over quantity: peacekeepers improve maternal and child health and encourage family planning by enabling donors and humanitarian actors to deliver infrastructures and services and facilitating citizens’ access to such services. We also provide evidence that the UN mission revitalizes local economic activities, thus increasing the opportunity cost of childbearing.

Peacebuilding Accountability: The United Nations Peacebuilding Fund and Community‐Based Monitoring and Evaluation

International peacebuilding as a discourse and practice has expanded rapidly in the nearly three decades since the publication of Boutros Boutros‐Ghali's Agenda for Peace. Alongside the growth of peacebuilding efforts has come the realization that many peacebuilding projects conceived of and sponsored by the international community have failed to meet their own objectives or, more importantly, have failed to be embraced fully by those whom they were supposed to help: the individuals and communities attempting to rebuild their lives in post‐conflict countries. One area that has been under‐examined and—in particular—under‐theorized is the role and impact of funder accountability mechanisms on local ownership, community agency, and peacebuilding success. However, in the development field some work has been done to examine accountability models and to try to develop new ones. As part of a project funded by the Council on Foreign Relations, the author served as a local peacebuilding advisor to the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund's monitoring and evaluation team, where he led an effort to develop a more collaborative evaluation method designed to close accountability loops by including a broader range of actors than that normally considered by current evaluation methodologies. This article offers a scoping analysis of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the interactions between large international donor agencies and local peacebuilding efforts. It also presents a preview of one agency's determined efforts to bridge those gaps and implement programs and processes designed to promote local agency while supporting transparent accountability.

When the digits don't add up: Research strategies for post-digital peacebuilding.

This article develops a post-digital perspective for the study of international peacebuilding and elaborates its merits. Contrary to narratives in policy and practice that tend to fetishize the digital, digital peacebuilding cannot be meaningfully separated from peacebuilding before digitalization. Resisting the call for a "digital turn," a post-digital lens helps to research, rewrite, and rework the digital while simultaneously staying with and moving beyond digitalization. It aims to demystify the role of digital technologies while enabling critical scrutiny of their impact on contemporary and future peacebuilding. More specifically, the post-digital helps us to (1) establish a critical distance to narratives of fast-paced innovation and progress that fetishize the digital, (2) scrutinize how digitalization compounds contemporary approaches and constellations of peacebuilding, (3) engage with the uneven temporalities of digital peacebuilding and its diverse global manifestations, (4) shed light on its real, embodied, and tangible effects on conflict-affected populations, (5) hold digitalization accountable by unearthing disillusionments and failures, (6) re-adjust our focus on human agency in the development and use of the socio-technical systems that constitute digital peacebuilding, (7) and finally, take a rhizomatic view that is concerned with how power relations make and break digitalized peacebuilding networks.

Post-reconstruction enclosures: an infrastructural perspective on the post-conflict landscape of the Old City (Mostar)

This article looks at the landscape of the Old City of Mostar eighteen years after the reconstruction of its famous Old Bridge. The reconstruction project took place within broader international peace-building efforts, foregrounding the bridge as a symbol of multicultural reconciliation and initiating the development of tourism. We explore a landscape perspective to reflect on the aftermath of this neoliberal peacebuilding project which created a commodified landscape image, endangering the site as a public space. By disallowing the local community to engage with the reconstruction process, the project limited participatory ways of dealing with the past, but also public arenas for negotiating a shared future. To unpack this, we look at the heritage-landscape as a process and focus on its infrastructural aspects. We aim to outline an infrastructural perspective which helps understand how the future of public space and participation were conditioned by the process of neoliberal peacebuilding through heritage.

‘Jihad is Planted in Our Hearts’: International Aid, Rebel Institutions and Women’s Participation in the Bangsamoro

ABSTRACT This article explores the encounter between the Women, Peace and Security agenda and rebel institutions in Mindanao. The analysis highlights that activities aiming to support women’s participation in peacebuilding often exist in parallel with and fail to fully recognise women’s existing forms of mobilisation within Non-State Armed Groups. This gap is bridged by civil society brokers who are associated with armed groups but speak the language of international peacebuilding frameworks. The findings point to the important role of such intermediaries in translating international norms, and to rebel groups and institutions as arenas for women’s political mobilisation and empowerment.

Peacebuilding in the Anthropocene: Negotiating the Problems of Acting in an Entangled World

The performance of international peacebuilding has been far below the high expectations set after the end of the Cold War. Criticism of the modernist conviction that it is possible to build peace along the lines of universal and linear blueprints has accompanied peacebuilding ever since its inception. this critique has gained depth and significance within the broader context of the Anthropocene. This 'intervention' article focuses upon two important publications in this field: Ignasi Torrent’s Entangled Peace: UN Peacebuilding and the Limits of a Relational World (2021) and Jan Pospisil’s Peace in Political Unsettlement: Beyond Solving Conflict (2019). Both monographs highlight that a reconsideration of peacebuilding in the Anthropocene is necessary and search for ways to engage with peacebuilding more effectively and more realistically. However, they also indicate a fundamental problem of how to work in this field without assumptions of linear causal impacts. Based on a through analysis of Torrent's and Pospisil's understandings of peacebuilding practice, this article introduces and scrutinizes the dilemma that arises from the need to reject narrow and instrumentalist approaches in the entangled world of the Anthropocene while maintaining that it is nevertheless necessary to navigate peace and still to act in this world.

Unsettling Peace: The Settler-Colonial Challenge to the Local Turn

ABSTRACT The local turn in Peace Studies has raised important practical and normative questions around the ‘liberal peace’ approach that defines post-Cold War international peacebuilding. However, recent critical interventions reveal the limits of the local turn’s engagement with themes including race, gender, class, and colonialism. Engaging Indigenous authors who ground diverse conceptualizations of peace in the restitution of Indigenous land, the following discussion shows how the local turn’s theoretical framing of indigeneity risks erasing decolonial accounts of Indigenous peacebuilding in settler-colonial societies through its conceptual reliance on international intervention and normative prioritization of hybrid peace outcomes.

Micro‐Evidence for Peacebuilding Theories and Policies edited by YuichiKubota, Singapore, Springer, 2022, viii +120 pp.

The Developing EconomiesEarly View Book Review Micro-Evidence for Peacebuilding Theories and Policies edited by Yuichi Kubota, Singapore, Springer, 2022, viii +120 pp. Wakako Maekawa, Corresponding Author Wakako Maekawa [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0003-3879-8874 Osaka University, Osaka, JapanEmail [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Wakako Maekawa, Corresponding Author Wakako Maekawa [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0003-3879-8874 Osaka University, Osaka, JapanEmail [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 29 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/deve.12371Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES Axelrod, Robert. 1967. “Conflict of Interest: An Axiomatic Approach.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 11, no. 1: 87– 99. Gleditsch, Kristian Skrede. 2002. All International Politics Is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hellmüller, Sara. 2013. “The Power of Perceptions: Localizing International Peacebuilding Approaches.” International Peacekeeping 20, no. 2: 219– 32. Langer, Arnim, and Frances Stewart. 2014. “ Horizontal Inequalities and Violent Conflict: Conceptual and Empirical Linkages.” In Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars, edited by Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen. London: Routledge. MacGinty, Roger, and Oliver P. Richmond. 2013. “The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace.” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5: 763– 83. Talentino, Andrea Kathryn. 2007. “Perceptions of Peacebuilding: The Dynamics of Imposer and Imposed Upon.” International Studies Perspectives 8, no. 2: 152– 71. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Protecting Women from Violence in the United Nations Protection of Civilians Sites, South Sudan?

ABSTRACT This article explores the everyday politics of protecting women from war and atrocities, based on ethnographic work within the United Nations Protection of Civilians sites, South Sudan. It examines the heterogenous ways that peacekeepers and displaced people conceptualised and enacted women's rights and protection inside the sites. Protection and gender were variously interpreted, resisted, and transformed. But sexual and gender-based violence remained rife in these makeshift ‘safe havens’. These experiences demonstrate that international peacebuilders cannot impose gendered protection. They must engage with local authorities and activists to promote women, peace and security in warzones.

Digital Disruption and Rethinking the ‘Script’ of Peace Mediation

Summary This article focuses on the quest for digitalisation in peace mediation and to the extent to which digital disruption is reshaping its practices. While digitalisation in the wider field of diplomacy has seen dramatic changes in its practices, peace mediation is a ‘latecomer’. The article explores the constitutive effects on specific norms and practices of peace mediation and identifies opportunities as well as the restraining and even counterproductive effects of digitalisation. Digital technologies, tools and social media platforms are mapped to assess their roles and impact on key practices and to critically analyse the digitalisation of peace mediation. Moreover, a content analysis of international strategic policy documents and central frameworks relevant for international peacebuilding operations is conducted, which shows that digitalisation has taken place gradually and cautiously. Since there are few theoretical and empirical studies on the digitalisation of peace mediation, the article concludes by suggesting three directions to be taken in future research.

Introduction to the special issue: in/civility in peace and conflict

ABSTRACT In this introduction to the special issue, we bring anthropological debates about civility into conversation with peace and conflict research on civil society peacebuilding. International peacebuilding has been widely criticised for its claims to being impartial and based entirely on technical expertise and, therefore, to acting outside politics, disguising processes of exclusion and hierarchies such as those between the global/local and the civil/uncivil. Extending from this critique, we propose civility as a conceptual lens to focus on the practices and norms aimed at promoting restraint and respect in violent conflict. Through this lens, we seek to examine the ambivalent notions and practices – often considered ‘the virtue’ – of civil society as manifested in public claims for decency, respect, peace and doing good. By (re-)drawing boundaries in society, these claims create possibilities for solidarity and peaceful politics across differences, but they often also (re-)produce conflict, violence and inequalities between people and groups.