The 'Local Turn' in Peacebuilding

The 'Local Turn' in Peacebuilding
Author: Joakim Ojendal
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018-10-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351867539

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Contemporary practices of international peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction are often unsatisfactory. There is now a growing awareness of the significance of local governments and local communitites as an intergrated part of peacebuilding in order to improve quality and enhance precision of interventions. In spite of this, ‘the local’ is rarely a key factor in peacebuilding, hence ‘everyday peace’ is hardly achieved. The aim of this volume is threefold: firstly it illuminates the substantial reasons for working with a more localised approach in politically volatile contexts. Secondly it consolidates a growing debate on the significance of the local in these contexts. Thirdly, it problematizes the often too swiftly used concept, ‘the local’, and critically discuss to what extent it is at all feasible to integrate this into macro-oriented and securitized contexts. This is a unique volume, tackling the ‘local turn’ of peacebuilding in a comprehensive and critical way. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding

Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding
Author: Elisa Randazzo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2017-06-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317208692

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This book examines the logic behind the shifts and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peacebuilding. In particular, the book is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered how we think about peacebuilding beyond the ‘liberal peacebuilding’ paradigm. To do so, the book engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peacebuilding, from hands-on institutionalisation, to the ‘local turn’. It uses the case of Kosovo to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards more invasive and intrusive forms of peacebuilding first. However, it is also crucial to understanding the recent local turn, as the rise of local ownership discourses in Kosovo is fundamentally tied to the critiques of extensive international missions, and the associated resistance and marginalisation of local agency. The book examines the implications of the framing of ‘everyday’ agency in order to assess the extent to which these bottom-up approaches have been able to by-pass the problems attributed to the liberal peace approach. It argues that despite its critical and radical intentions, the local turn retains certain foundational modernist and positivist qualities that have so far characterised the very mainstream approaches these critiques claim to transcend. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, statebuilding, peace and conflict studies, security studies and International Relations in general.

International Peacebuilding and Local Involvement

International Peacebuilding and Local Involvement
Author: Dahlia Simangan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429680481

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This book interrogates the common perception that liberal peace is in crisis and explores the question: can the local turn save liberal peacebuilding? Presenting a case for a liberal renaissance in peacebuilding, the work interrogates the assumptions behind the popular perception that liberal peace is in crisis. It re-examines three of the cases igniting the debate – Cambodia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste – and evaluates how these transitional administrations implemented their liberal mandates and how local involvement affected the conduct of their activities. In so doing, it reveals that these cases were neither liberal nor peacebuilding. It also demonstrates that while local involvement is imperative to peacebuilding, illiberal local involvement restores an elite-centred status quo and reinforces or creates new forms of conflict and violence. Using both liberal and critical lenses, the author ultimately argues that the conceptual and operational departure from the holistic and comprehensive origins of liberal peacebuilding in fact paved the way for the liberal peace crisis itself. Drawing on analysis from in-depth field research and interviews, this book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, statebuilding, security studies and International Relations in general.

Peacebuilding and Local Ownership

Peacebuilding and Local Ownership
Author: Timothy Donais
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 041558874X

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This book explores the meaning of local ownership in peacebuilding and examines the ways in which it has been, and could be, operationalized in post-conflict environments. In the context of post-conflict peacebuilding, the idea of local ownership is based upon the premise that no peace process is sustainable in the absence of a meaningful degree of local involvement. Despite growing recognition of the importance of local ownership, however, relatively little attention has been paid to specifying what precisely the concept means or how it might be implemented. This volume contributes to the ongoing debate on the future of liberal peacebuilding through a critical investigation of the notion of local ownership, and challenges conventional assumptions about who the relevant locals are and what they are expected to own. Drawing on case studies from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, the text argues that local ownership can only be fostered through a long-term consensus-building process, which involves all levels of the conflict-affected society. This book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, development studies, security studies and IR.

Peacebuilding and Friction

Peacebuilding and Friction
Author: Annika Björkdahl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317365267

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This book aims to understand the processes and outcomes that arise from frictional encounters in peacebuilding, when global and local forces meet. Building a sustainable peace after violent conflict is a process that entails competing ideas, political contestation and transformation of power relations. This volume develops the concept of ‘friction’ to better analyse the interplay between global ideas, actors, and practices, and their local counterparts. The chapters examine efforts undertaken to promote sustainable peace in a variety of locations, such as Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone. These case analyses provide a nuanced understanding not simply of local processes, or of the hybrid or mixed agencies, ideas, and processes that are generated, but of the complex interactions that unfold between all of these elements in the context of peacebuilding intervention. The analyses demonstrate how the ambivalent relationship between global and local actors leads to unintended and sometimes counterproductive results of peacebuilding interventions. The approach of this book, with its focus on friction as a conceptual tool, advances the peacebuilding research agenda and adds to two ongoing debates in the peacebuilding field; the debate on hybridity, and the debate on local agency and local ownership. In analysing frictional encounters this volume prepares the ground for a better understanding of the mixed impact peace initiatives have on post-conflict societies. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, security studies, and international relations in general.

Peacebuilding

Peacebuilding
Author: David Chandler
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2017-03-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319503227

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This book is the first to chart the rise and fall of peacebuilding. Charting its beginnings, as an ad-hoc extension of peacekeeping responsibilities, and formalisation, as a UN-supported international project of building liberal states. Twenty years later, the grounding policy assumptions of peacebuilding - that democracy, the rule of law and free markets were a universal solution to conflict-prone states and societies - have been revealed as naïve at best, and at worst, hubristic and Eurocentric. Here, Chandler traces the disillusionment with international peacebuilding, and the discursive shifts in the self-understanding of the peacebuilding project in policy and academic debate. He charts the transformation from peacebuilding as an international project based on universalist assumptions, to the understanding of peace as a necessarily indigenous process based on plural and non-linear understandings of difference. Is the end of peacebuilding necessarily a cause for celebration? Does this shift result in a realist resignation to the world as it appears? Is it necessary to “marry idealism with realism” – as E.H. Carr once argued - if we wish to keep open the possibilities for social change? This book seeks to answer these questions, making an invaluable reference both for students and practitioners of peacebuilding and for those interested in the broader shifts in the social and political grounding of policy-making today.

Peacebuilding in Crisis

Peacebuilding in Crisis
Author: Tobias Debiel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2016-01-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317511247

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The 1990s saw a constant increase in international peace missions, predominantly led by the United Nations, whose mandates were more and more extended to implement societal and political transformations in post-conflict societies. However, in many cases these missions did not meet the high expectations and did not acquire a sufficient legitimacy on the local level. Written by leading experts in the field, this edited volume brings together ‘liberal’ and ‘post-liberal’ approaches to peacebuilding. Besides challenging dominant peacebuilding paradigms, the book scrutinizes how far key concepts of post-liberal peacebuilding offer sound categories and new perspectives to reframe peacebuilding research. It thus moves beyond the ‘liberal’–‘post-liberal’ divide and systematically integrates further perspectives, paving the way for a new era in peacebuilding research which is theory-guided, but also substantiated in the empirical analysis of peacebuilding practices. This book will be essential reading for postgraduate students and scholar-practitioners working in the field of peacebuilding. By embedding the subject area into different research perspectives, the book will also be relevant for scholars who come from related backgrounds, such as democracy promotion, transitional justice, statebuilding, conflict and development research and international relations in general.

A Post-liberal Peace

A Post-liberal Peace
Author: Oliver P. Richmond
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0415667828

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This book examines how the liberal peace experiment of the post-Cold War environment has failed to connect with its target populations, which have instead set about transforming it according to their own local requirements. Liberal peacebuilding has caused a range of unintended consequences. These emerge from the liberal peaceâe(tm)s internal contradictions, from its claim to offer a universal normative and epistemological basis for peace, and to offer a technology and process which can be applied to achieve it. When viewed from a range of contextual and local perspectives, these top-down and distant processes often appear to represent power rather than humanitarianism or emancipation. Yet, the liberal peace also offers a civil peace and emancipation. These tensions enable a range of hitherto little understood local and contextual peacebuilding agencies to emerge, which renegotiate both the local context and the liberal peace framework, leading to a local-liberal hybrid form of peace. This might be called a post-liberal peace. Such processes are examined in this book in a range of different cases of peacebuilding and statebuilding since the end of the Cold War. This book will be of interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, peace and conflict studies, international organisations and IR/Security Studies.

The Frontlines of Peace

The Frontlines of Peace
Author: Severine Autesserre
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197530370

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At turns surprising, funny, and gut-wrenching, this is the hopeful story of the ordinary yet extraordinary people who have figured out how to build lasting peace in their communities The word "peacebuilding" evokes a story we've all heard over and over: violence breaks out, foreign nations are scandalized, peacekeepers and million-dollar donors come rushing in, warring parties sign a peace agreement and, sadly, within months the situation is back to where it started--sometimes worse. But what strategies have worked to build lasting peace in conflict zones, particularly for ordinary citizens on the ground? And why should other ordinary citizens, thousands of miles away, care? In The Frontlines of Peace, Séverine Autesserre, award-winning researcher and peacebuilder, examines the well-intentioned but inherently flawed peace industry. With examples drawn from across the globe, she reveals that peace can grow in the most unlikely circumstances. Contrary to what most politicians preach, building peace doesn't require billions in aid or massive international interventions. Real, lasting peace requires giving power to local citizens. Now including teaching and book club discussion guides, The Frontlines of Peace tells the stories of the ordinary yet extraordinary individuals and organizations that are confronting violence in their communities effectively. One thing is clear: successful examples of peacebuilding around the world, in countries at war or at peace, have involved innovative grassroots initiatives led by local people, at times supported by foreigners, often employing methods shunned by the international elite. By narrating success stories of this kind, Autesserre shows the radical changes we must take in our approach if we hope to build lasting peace around us--whether we live in Congo, the United States, or elsewhere.

Is Local Beautiful?

Is Local Beautiful?
Author: Sara Hellmüller
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2013-12-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3319003062

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Based on the swisspeace annual conference 2012, the publication examines the delicate balance between external interventions and locally-led initiatives. It addresses the question of what “local” means in the peacebuilding and development context; which actors on the ground actually represent the local level and how external actors choose their partners from amongst them. Moreover, it examines how local ownership - emerging as key criteria for any external intervention - is constituted: does this concept only imply local participation or is local control from the outset a must? Finally, it assesses the potential of locally-led initiatives and local conflict resolution mechanisms and their interaction with external interventions. Several authors provide insights on these questions and nuance our thinking about both local ownership and external interventions. As such, the publication aims to encourage critical reflections on this topical debate in peacebuilding and development.