![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
Abstract
With the advent of the local turn in the mid-2000s, critical approaches have attempted to rethink peace building from the bottom up, placing local agents at the centre of the debate, declaring the end of top-down governance and affirming the fragmented, complex and plural nature of the social milieu. While local turn approaches have become popular in peace-building theory, this article invites the reader to question and problematise the local turn’s use of the concept of ‘everyday’, in order to explore paradoxes and contradictions that indicate the need to think more deeply about the impact of the local turn’s project of critique.
Notes
1. Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” 56.
2. Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making,” 146.
3. See Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace”; Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making”; and Boege et al., “Building Peace.”
4. Richmond, Peace in International Relations.
5. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building.”
6. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 234.
7. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building,” 766; and Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace.”
8. Donais, Peacebuilding and Local Ownership, 95; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace”, 226–244; Lemay-Hébert, “The Bifurcation of the Two Worlds”; and Newman, “A Human Security Peace-building Agenda,” 1745.
9. Critiques on peace building vary greatly in provenance, from within the liberal paradigm itself, to neo-gramscian, constructivist Foucauldian and neo-materialist perspectives. See, respectively, Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding”; Selby, “The Myth of Liberal Peace-building”; Hehir, “Introduction”; Duffield, “The Liberal Way of Development”; and De Coning, “Understanding Peacebuilding as Essentially Local.” Recent perspectives on peace building that focus local agendas, but do not place as much emphasis on emancipation, include research that prioritises the attainment of order and stability. See, for instance, Hughes and Hutchinson, “Development Effectiveness”; and Mulaj, “The Problematic Legitimacy of Internationally-led State-building.”
10. See Campbell, “Construing Top-down as Bottom-up”; Felix da Costa and Karlsrud, “Contextualising Liberal Peacebuilding”; Hameiri, Regulating Statehood; Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu, “The OECD’s Discourse on Fragile States”; and Wolff, “Post-conflict State Building.”
11. Smoljan, “The Relationship between Peace Building and Development,” 245; and Jahn, “The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: (Part I).”
12. Brown and Gusmao, “Looking for the Owner of the House.”
13. Boege, “Hybrid Forms of Peace and Order,” 104.
14. Caplan, “Who Guards the Guardians?”; Chandler, Empire in Denial; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building”; and Wilde, “Colonialism Redux?”
15. Hopgood, “Reading the Small Print in Global Civil Society,” 2.
16. Jahn, “The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: (Part II)”; and Jahn, “The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: (Part I).”
17. Duffield, “The Liberal Way of Development”; Jabri, “War, Government, Politics”; Pugh, “Towards Life Welfare”; and Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding and Global Governance.
18. See Demmers et al., Good Governance.
19. Chandler, Bosnia, 148; and Pugh, “Transformation in the Political Economy of Bosnia.”
20. Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism,” 325.
21. Jahn, “Kant, Mill, and Illiberal Legacies”; and Joseph, “Globalization and Governmentality.”
22. See Hynek, “Rethinking Human Security”; Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War; Franks, “Beware of Liberal Peacebuilders”; Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development; and Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace”, 665–692.
23. For comprehensive accounts of liberal forms of discipline as they pertain to international governance and discourses of development and capacity building, see Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping; and Larner and Walters, Global Governmentality.
24. Baskin, “Local Governance in Kosovo,” 88; Boege et al., “Building Peace and Political Community,” 612; and Jabri, “Peacebuilding, the Local and the International.”
25. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 234; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace”; Mac Ginty, “Introduction”; and Lidén, “Building Peace.”, 226–244
26. Tadjbakhsh, “Introduction,” 7.
27. Richmond, “Reclaiming Peace in International Relations,” 454.
28. See, for instance, Felix da Costa and Karlsrud, “Contextualising Liberal Peacebuilding.”
29. Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Reconstruction,” 210–211.
30. Kraushaar and Lambach, Hybrid Political Orders, 1.
31. Shinko, “Agonistic Peace,” 474.
32. Richmond, “Foucault and the Paradox of Peace-as-Governance.”
33. Bliesemann de Guevara, “Introduction,” 121; and Boege, “Hybrid Forms of Peace and Order.”
34. Sabaratnam, “Situated Critiques of Intervention,” 260.
35. Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace.
36. Robins, “An Empirical Approach,” 51.
37. Bush, “Commodification, Compartmentalization, and Militarization”; Castañeda, “How Liberal Peacebuilding may be Failing”; Darby and Mac Ginty, “Conclusion”; and Lederach, “Cultivating Peace.”
38. Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making,” 149.
39. Goodhand and Hulme, “From Wars to Complex Political Emergencies,” 24.
40. Richmond, “Reclaiming Peace in International Relations,” 457.
41. Pouligny, Peace Operations; Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism”; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace”, 665–692; and Shinko, “Agonistic Peace,” 487–489.
42. Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace,” 575.
43. Jarstad and Belloni, “Introducing Hybrid Peace Governance,” 4.
44. Heathershaw and Lambach, “Introduction.”
45. Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism,” 331.
46. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 234; Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, 18; Belloni, “Hybrid Peace Governance,” 31; Lidén, “Building Peace between Global and Local Politics”; Richmond and Franks, “Liberal Hubris?”; and Richmond, “UN Peace Operations.”
47. Tadjbakhsh, “Introduction,” 7.
48. Non-linear perspectives, originating in computational and information system studies have been embraced by scholars of post-conflict peace building who seek to make sense of the manner in which responses to conflict have been framed so far and how best to encapsulate the reality of conflict territories without reducing them to the sum of their parts. See, for instance, Burns, “Facilitating Systemic Conflict Transformation”; Körppen, “Space beyond the Liberal Peacebuilding Consensus”; Chandler, “Peacebuilding and the Politics of Non-linearity”; and Vimalarajah and Nadarajah, “Thinking Peace.”
49. See Debrix’s account of international forms of liberal discipline operated through a multitude of ‘global surveillance mechanisms’. Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping, 84.
50. Mitchell and Kelly, “Peaceful Spaces?”
51. Albrecht and Wiuff Moe, “The Simultaneity of Authority,” 15; and Boege “Vying for Legitimacy,” 247.
52. See Sabaratnam, “Situated Critiques of Intervention”; Heathershaw, “Towards Better Theories of Peacebuilding”; and Hameiri, “A Reality Check.”
53. See, for instance, Mitchell and Richmond, “Introduction,” 24.
54. Devic, “Transnationalization of Civil Society in Kosovo,” 262.
55. Fawn and Richmond, “De Facto States in the Balkans.”
56. Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace,” 572.
57. Mitchell and Richmond, “Towards a Post-liberal Peace,” 24.
58. Ramsbotham, “Radical Disagreement and Systemic Conflict Transformation.”
59. The everyday is qualified as a more authentic field of agency vis-à-vis forms of knowledge that have been biased towards Western agendas. See Robins, “An Empirical Approach.” It has also been referred to as the ‘authentic local’, ‘actual local’ or ‘real everyday’. Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism,” 328, 326.
60. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace,” 687.
61. By ‘normalisation’ is meant the process through which power that ‘constitutes the other side of juridical and political structures of political representation’ is utilised to shape conduct within society by affirming what is normal and what is not. See Foucault, ‘Society must be Defended’, 49. As normalisation functions to ‘make normal’ behaviour, it defines normal behaviour by identifying abnormal behaviour that needs to be harmonised or removed. Taylor, “Normativity and Normalization,” 52.
62. This process of normalisation implies the persistence of a particular form of power that sustains and legitimises certain narratives, allowing them to become just as hegemonic as the liberal peace has been in the past. While I do not have the space to elaborate on the type of power that supports the local turn’s project of change, it is still possible to point to Michel Foucault for a reflection that most narratives, in their attempt to subvert the hegemony of a meta-narrative, are also expressing their own desire to become hegemonic by replacing the orthodoxy. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 794.
63. Clark, “Hybridity, Holism, and Traditional Justice”; and Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making.”
64. Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, 81.
65. Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development, 80.
66. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace,” 687.
67. Richmond and Mac Ginty, “Where Now?,” 173.
68. Richmond and Mac Ginty, “Where Now?,” 184.
69. For a comprehensive overview of the relationship between anti-foundationalist perspectives and the issue of space and agency, see Murdoch, Post-structuralist Geography. Post-structuralist, in particular Foucauldian, scholars have been interested in the way in which spatialisation of identities has permitted particular instruments of governmentality and discipline. See Kingfisher, “Spatializing Neoliberalism.” Recent anti-foundationalist perspectives on peace building have called for a neo-materialist approach to peace studies to reflect a sensitivity to contingency and complexity, looking beyond the ‘dualistic categories that many peace-building strategies are based on, such as inside/outside or global/local’. See Körppen, “Space beyond the Liberal Peacebuilding Consensus,” 90; Wiuff Moe, “Relationality and Pragmatism in Peacebuilding”; and Chadwick et al., Relational Sensibility.
70. Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, 153.
71. Shah, “The Failure of State Building,” 19.
72. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building,” 780.
73. Galvanek, Translating Peacebuilding Rationalities.
74. Chandler, Resilience, 78–79.
75. See, for instance, Sabaratnam, “IR in Dialogue.”
76. Peterson, “A Conceptual Unpacking of Hybridity.”
77. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace,” 670.
78. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace” (2011), 232; and Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,” 210.
79. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity.”
80. Visoka, “Three Levels of Hybridisation Practices.”
81. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity,” 506.
82. Mac Ginty and Sanghera, “Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development.”
83. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures.
84. Mitchell and Kelly, “Peaceful Spaces?”; and Watson, “Agency and the Everyday Activist.”
85. Paffenholz, “Civil Society beyond the Liberal Peace,” 148; Shinko, “Agonistic Peace”; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace” (2011), 231; and Bargués-Pedreny, “Realising the Post-modern Dream.”
86. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace” (2011), 232; and Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,” 210.
87. Murdoch, Post-structuralist Geography, 56.