Winning wars,building (illiberal) peace? The rise (and possible fall) of a victor’s peace in Rwanda and Sri Lanka

The literature on peacebuilding dedicates very little space, empirically and theoretically, to countries that are emerging from a war waged to a decisive outcome. This review essay looks at Sri Lanka and Rwanda, two countries where a victorious leadership has led the process of post-conflict reconstruction, largely by employing illiberal means. It looks at the effect of decisive war on statebuilding and at the role of local agency and illiberal practices in a post-victory context. It concludes by assessing the global significance and long-term sustainability of post-victory illiberal statebuilding.     

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.     

Critical peacebuilding and the dilemma of difference: the stigma of the ‘local’ and the quest for equality

Recent research has revealed the need to include and understand local actors in order to improve the effectiveness of peacebuilding. According to these analyses, peacebuilding could become more respectful of cultural differences thanks to a genuine engagement with the specificities of the local. Empirical studies of the ‘different’ local have thus flourished in the field with the ambition of countering the universalist tendency of traditional peacebuilding. Through the use of the concept of ‘dilemma of difference’, this article challenges this intuitive argument and argues that these approaches risk reproducing a stigma attached to the ‘different’ local. Indeed, emphasising difference in order to ensure its respect means separating and reifying ‘it’ as a deviation from the norm(al). As such, this analytical strategy is likely to recreate the stigma that contributed to the exclusion of local actors in previous peacebuilding practice and research. In contrast, I outline three strategies for studying difference differently in peacebuilding: focusing on the institutional arrangements that enabled specific differences to emerge and become visible; recognising that these differences are internal to peacebuilding (and thus an unlikely source of alternative and emancipation); and revealing the unstated and implicit Self for/from whom local difference is relevant.     

Conflict resolution classrooms to careers: an emergent theory of change with implications for a strategy in peace education

Peace education provides for the development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions appropriate to effective peacebuilding. Therefore, the development of curriculum in degree programs which builds bridges by which students in conflict resolution/peace studies classrooms may cross over to the field of conflict transformation and peacebuilding may properly be thought of as within the sphere of peace education. This paper describes an emerging theory of change in the context of the peace education offered by a graduate and undergraduate program of conflict resolution. It is argued that employability exists at the nexus of student skills and attributes, and the demands of a labor market which a partnership between experienced practitioners and academics has a responsibility to inform and shape through outreach, education, practice, evaluation, research, and publication.     

Economic Assistance to Peacebuilding and Reconciliation Community-Based Projects in Northern Ireland and the Border Counties: Challenges,Opportunities and Evolution

The International Fund for Ireland and the European Union (EU) Peace III Fund have provided external economic resources to local community projects in Northern Ireland and the Border region to support intercommunal relations, community development, economic development, peacebuilding and reconciliation. The British and Irish governments, the EU, and the USA see the economic aid as their commitment to support the peace process, nurture the local voluntary sector, and build the peace dividend. The research findings demonstrate that the reality on the ground is more complex. Some believe that the economic assistance has created employment opportunities, built capacity, and localized peacebuilding knowledge. Others are more sceptical and perceive that the aid has created dependency, facilitated a competitive milieu, and has not transformed relationships in a sectarian environment.     

Refugee youth in settlement,schooling, and social action: reviewing current research through a transnational lens

How do refugee youth engage in peacebuilding, civic participation, and social action through their educational experiences? This article draws from transnational frameworks, specifically Ajrun Appadurai’s notion of ‘imagined worlds’ with an emphasis on ethnoscapes as a framework through which to review literature on refugee young peoples’ involvement in peacebuilding, participation, and social action in schools, focusing particularly on experiences from countries of settlement outside of refugee camps. This study examines current literature on refugee youth schooling and social engagement along three main themes: the student, the school, and the wider society. Each section considers the implications of the scholarly literature in a transnational framework, identifying what transnational flows (i.e. people, capital, ideas, media, technology, etc.) and what imagined worlds are reflected in the literature. In conducting this analysis, I aim to dislodge peacebuilding education from spatially fixed contexts of ‘fragility’ that assigns a nation-state as the primary reference point of peace and conflict, to instead examine the transnational nature both of conflict and of the agency that displaced youth can mobilize to transform conflict through peacebuilding.     

Informing Grassroots Development: The 1994–1995 Peacebuilding Experience in Northern Ghana

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) focused on poverty alleviation play a central role in responding to conflict situations and initiating peacebuilding activities. Following the 1994–1995 conflict in Northern Ghana, development NGOs coordinated a largely effective grassroots peacebuilding effort. However, insights gained from peacebuilding activities have not informed ongoing development efforts, which continue to propose ‘top-down’ strategies. By examining the strengths and limitations of the peace process in Ghana, this article suggests development NGOs apply the grassroots strategies they used for peacebuilding to their ongoing development activities. This analysis is based on data drawn from archival research as well as field interviews with 21 representatives of the state and NGOs, and community and religious leaders.     

Learning peace (and conflict): the role of primary learning materials in peacebuilding in post-war Afghanistan,South Sudan and Sri Lanka

Post-war education is usually considered a positive contributor to peacebuilding; however, it can also reinforce divisive perspectives. Textbooks and learning materials can be instrumental in maintaining or exacerbating existing inequalities. This paper uses case study literature reviews of Afghanistan, South Sudan and Sri Lanka to explore the ways in which primary learning materials extend existing challenges of post-war education and potentially create new ones. An analysis of the literature on learning materials from these countries reveals that textbook development and uses are intertwined with larger national and international political and social power structures. We draw from Bourdieu and Giroux to consider how learning materials contribute to the reproduction of cultures of hostility, violence, divisiveness and silence or to transformatory cultures of peacebuilding, inclusivity and critical thought. Our resulting conceptual lens highlights how education can take on the role of being a victim, accomplice or transformer of conflict – roles that are often overlapping. Each case study country is taking steps towards peacebuilding through their primary learning materials; however, there are many elements of the textbook design, development, production and distribution process in each country that also reinforce contributing factors for conflict.     

Motivations for local resistance in international peacebuilding

This article discusses the complex motivations underlying local resistance to externally led post-war peacebuilding programmes. In examining the land distribution process in post-war Cambodia it proposes a five-part typology of motivations for the resistance that frequently appears in the context of international post-conflict peacebuilding processes. The article also argues that a single campaign of resistance is likely to involve multiple actors with multiple motivations.     

Integrating subjectivities of power and violence in peacebuilding analysis

Abstract

Over the last 20 years the local domain has gained widespread attention in the analysis of peacebuilding. While this debate has contributed to an important review of many assumptions underlying peacebuilding practice and analysis, the subjective domain of peacebuilding – how actors experience and make sense of these transformations – still needs to be more methodically explored. In particular, while different narratives of peace have been analysed in this literature, much more rarely has there been a systematic discussion linking peace with power and violence and the different understandings and experiences around these two concepts. In this article I argue that integrating violence and power more systematically in the local turn and exploring their subjective domain can greatly benefit this debate, including by contributing to the elaboration of conceptual and theoretical tools more aligned with Southern epistemologies.     

Gaps in knowledge about local peacebuilding: a study in deficiency from Jos,Nigeria

ABSTRACT

The emphasis on local or hybrid efforts in peacebuilding literature brings front and centre the importance of being rooted within a particular context, with leadership and vision for social change and justice proffered by local actors. This is the same emphasis found in development literature and a necessary foundation for transformation. Scholars and practitioners nevertheless also note a role for outsiders in supporting local efforts (eg Lederach in 2005). Yet a significant challenge arises for outsiders, and to some extent local actors: how do you know what was tried or is underway that you might support or from which you might learn? This paper reports findings from a collaborative research project that examined the gap between the practice of peacebuilding locally and internationally available ‘knowledge’ via publications produced on local peacebuilding in Jos, Nigeria, between 2001 and 2008. It identifies a staggering gap between efforts and knowledge in the form of publications. The paper discusses the implications of the findings in terms of what it means for outsiders when thinking about helping resource local transformation efforts.     

Transcending binaries in critical peacebuilding scholarship to address ‘inclusivity’ projects

Abstract

In light of the recent turn to ‘inclusivity’ in peacebuilding practice, this article problematises established ways of ‘doing critique’ in peacebuilding scholarship. Inclusivity refers to the building of peace as a situated and co-constituted process. This entails what can be termed a new epistemic commitment: the acknowledgement that peacebuilding as a dynamic and emergent phenomenon is also an epistemically co-constituted process. In the article, I make two arguments. First, the move towards inclusivity places currently dominant modes of scholarly critique at an impasse. Persistent ontological and epistemological binaries preclude a productive investigation and challenging of inclusivity projects and their epistemic commitment. Second, I argue that, by returning to historical conditions that were formative in the very emergence of the category of ‘the local’, the conceptual basis of an alternative mode of critique (re)appears. This alternative critical project allows for an analytical sensibility to peacebuilding as emergent and adaptive. It makes it possible to disentangle power relations as these emerge between different and possibly unexpected configurations of actors and knowledge claims in inclusivity projects.     

Power,politics and perception: the impact of foreign policy on civilian–peacekeeper relations

This article responds to a recent call for increased empirical evidence on the ‘local turn’ in the peacebuilding literature and discusses the impact of the international on local consent for peace operations. Using fresh empirical material this article examines the case of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). It shows how local perceptions of the foreign policies of peacekeeping contingents matter, and how this affects the functionality of the mission. This article highlights the heterogeneity of both United Nations peacekeeping missions and local populations, an issue that is insufficiently discussed in the literature on local engagement in peacebuilding/peacekeeping.     

Positive hybridity? Unpacking UN security sector reform in South Lebanon

Rebuilding the local legitimacy of a national army after civil war is an important part of security sector reform (SSR) to help ensure the survival of the institution once the statebuilding bandwagon has moved on. The peacebuilding literature argues local ownership can provide international actors with local legitimacy. This article shows how an international actor can help to legitimise a local institution. Using new empirical material, this article examines the capacity-building work of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) with the Lebanese Armed Forces, and opens up the ‘black box’ of the micro-processes of SSR. First, it shows how an international actor can build the local legitimacy of a national army over time to build local knowledge and develop strong relationships with key stakeholders at national and civilian levels. Second, it explicates the political tensions that impact local and international agency and create hybrid solutions on the ground. Finally it argues that a successful hybrid solution in peacebuilding is possible when the normative values of the SSR project are accepted by key stakeholders and the local population. The article argues that UNIFIL’s SSR is assisted by the factors of time, flexibility, and pragmatism.     

Towards agonistic peacebuilding? Exploring the antagonism–agonism nexus in the Middle East Peace process

Many contemporary conflicts are framed as antagonistic and difficult to resolve because of their zero-sum framing among the disputants. This article addresses the antagonism–agonism nexus and the political and contested nature of building peace. It has a three-fold aim: (1) to critically assess the interplay between constructive and destructive dynamics; (2) to analyse the circumstances under which conflict may move from antagonism to agonism; and (3) to advance the novel notion of agonistic peacebuilding. The Middle East Peace process is used as a critical case of intractable conflict to elucidate the enabling and restraining conditions for agonistic peacebuilding.     

Civil society,hybridity and peacebuilding in Burundi: questioning authenticity

Critics argue that liberal peacebuilding has resulted in the creation of a civil society populated with organisations that are artificial and externalised. These associations are contrasted with more locally-based groups that are considered to be more authentic and better able to build a hybrid peace that is emancipatory. At first glance, this characterisation appears to describe civil society in post-war Burundi, but on closer inspection a much more complex and interesting picture is revealed which challenges existing conceptualisations of post-conflict civil society. The paper finds that even associations that are deeply rooted in local communities are composites forged through their encounters with the global. Furthermore, this hybridity is not new. Rather it is the product of decades of prior hybridisation, raising important questions about the authenticity and legitimacy of these organisations and, ultimately, their ability to promote a peace that is transformative.     

Conflict Transformation and Civil Society: The Case of Nagorno-Karabakh

If Armenian and Azerbaijani negotiators ever agree on the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh, it will not necessarily resolve the long-running conflict, because any peace treaty would require the consent of the Karabakh Armenians, whose political representatives are currently excluded from peace negotiations. It is difficult to imagine the Karabakh Armenians consenting to such a treaty without a change in their perception of the Azerbaijanis. According to the theory of conflict transformation/peacebuilding, Nagorno-Karabakh’s civil society should be able to make a contribution to this change. Using the example of four Nagorno-Karabakh civil society organisations, this study shows how they positively or negatively influence conflict transformation.     

Liberia: security challenges,development fundamentals

This research article argues that security challenges in post-conflict Liberia cannot be addressed effectively without synchronising current stabilisation policies with the implementation of development fundamentals. The article explores key strategic sectors of the Liberian economy and their impact on the security and development dimensions of peace building. The political economy of post-conflict Liberia has not structurally modified an economic model which relies on the concessionary system and the extraction of raw materials at the expense of developing productive sectors which could be used to secure sustainable livelihoods. It is suggested that a shift in the political economy pursued by national and international actors is needed to link current peacebuilding efforts to sustainable development processes; one policy measure recommended to achieve such a goal is enhanced support for land reform and small farmers' rights.     

Sexual violence issues in eastern DRC: processes of global and local co-constitution

According to Séverine Autesserre, there is a dominant culture within the field of international peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo that excludes any action at the local level. This dichotomy between the local and the global is also noticeable in terms of women's rights, where international human rights law and local customs are opposed. But in order to grasp the complexity of the emancipation movements of the female victims of violence in North Kivu, we must consider the multiplicity of the semi-autonomous social fields that regulate the lives of individuals on the local and global spheres, as well as the social actors’ interactions within these spaces. Using the results of an ethnography study carried out in North Kivu between 2011 and 2012, we will see that these actors not only construct law, but they also inhabit normative systems built and maintained by them.