Revisiting the local turn in peacebuilding – through the emerging urban approach

Abstract

In this article, we revisit the ‘local turn’ debate in the peacebuilding literature, and explore its most recent and promising approach to ‘the local’, focussing on post-war cities and on urban dimensions of peacebuilding. There is still substantive contestation and frustration in the peacebuilding research field with regards to the conceptual fuzziness of ‘the local’, and with the continual failures of international interventions to actually take into account local perspectives, promote local agency and establish local ownership. In this article, we explore to what extent recent urban approaches to peacebuilding can help alleviate some of the conceptual problems that has persisted in the literature. We reflect on and raise questions about what a focus on cities and urban perspectives is contributing to the study of local peacebuilding more specifically. We suggest three facets of analytical added value: (1) an increased understanding of how the particularities of urban and rural space affects peacebuilding locally and potentially beyond; (2) how cities and urban space are interrelated with traditional territoriality; and (3) the methodological benefits of the city/urban as (local) analytical entry point. We also discuss potential pitfalls and limitations of urban approaches to peacebuilding, and identify prospective pathways for further research.

Keywords:

• urban peacebuilding
• local turn
• urbanisation
• rural
• post-war city

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the invaluable feedback from our two anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank our colleagues at the Development Research Seminar at the Department of Government in Uppsala, who provided important comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens jubileumsfond [grant number M16-0297:1 and P19-1494:1] and the Swedish Research Council [grant number 2013-06334].

Notes

1 The peacebuilding literature is not easily demarcated from the broader discourse of peace and conflict studies, involving studies on, for example, peacekeeping or conflict resolution, or war studies. While urban approaches seem to be increasingly prevalent in all of these interconnected fields, our main focus is on the (post-war) peacebuilding literature.

2 By this we mean that our focus is on peacebuilding studies, where there is a clear incorporation of theoretical perspectives and insights coming from the urban studies field. Urban studies is obviously also very broad and interdisciplinary (incorporating eg urban planning, urban sociology, geography, urban politics, studies on global cities, etc), but at its heart lies an idea that cities and built environments are not just simple and non-affectual ‘containers’ of human activities, but rather that they involve particular social, cultural, political, economic and material dynamics (for a historical background to the urban studies field and the meaning of ‘urban’, see eg Popenoe 1965; for a more recent description of the field, see eg LeGates 2001).

3 This volume also makes a point of merging the literature on urban violence coming from fields such as development studies and criminology, looking into interrelated issues of (for example) trafficking, terrorism and gang-related violence.

4 Interviews and field notes by Jarstad, March 2017, Johannesburg, South Africa. See also Jarstad (2021).

5 There are various and varying definitions of central concepts such as space and place in the literature. However, the notion of place typically refers to the physical and material aspects of the built environment that are used and made meaningful through human action and interaction. The notion of space goes beyond the material and physical of locations to refer to its ideational aspects and the social construction thereof (for a more thorough discussion on this, see Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016, 3–10). Another way of conceptualising urban space is to look at it as involving two dimensions (see Ljungkvist 2021, 11). The first relates to material-geographical aspects (eg the socio-spatial and material characteristics of cities in terms of density, sprawl, infrastructure, informal settlements, etc). The second has to do with political and socio-cultural aspects of urban space, relating to, for example, political, economic and civic culture, as well as the symbolic essence of built space.

6 For example, the concept of the ‘city proper’ describes a city according to an administrative jurisdiction, while a ‘metropolitan area’ is typically used to define the degree of economic and social interconnectedness (eg commerce or commuting patterns) of urban areas (UN 2018, 1). Concerning population size, there is also substantial variation in how different countries define their cities or urban areas. For example, Denmark and Iceland define an urban site as 200 inhabitants or more, the Netherlands and Nigeria have a threshold of 20,000, and Japan uses a 50,000-inhabitant threshold.

7 Field notes by Jarstad, March 2014, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

8 Interviews and field notes by Jarstad, March 2017, Johannesburg, South Africa.

9 Although this database focusses, as mentioned, on peacekeeping and not peacebuilding per se, it serves as an interesting illustration of these emerging methodologies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristin Ljungkvist

Kristin Ljungkvist is Assistant Professor in the Department of Security, Strategy and Leadership at the Swedish Defence University. She holds a PhD in political science from the Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on global cities, urban security and warfare, and on urban dimensions of global challenges such as terrorism and climate change. She is the author of The Global City 2.0 – From Strategic Site to Global Actor (2016, Routledge).

Anna Jarstad

Anna Jarstad is Professor in the Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden. She currently leads a project on relational peace that seeks to define, characterise and analyse different varieties of peace that evolve after civil war (varietiesofpeace.net). She has also done research on power sharing – when former combatants form joint governments – and the nexus of democratisation and peacebuilding in war-torn societies, especially in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Kosovo, Macedonia and South Africa. She is co-editor of From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and of the special issue ‘Introducing Hybrid Peace Governance: Impact and Prospects of Liberal Peacebuilding’ (Global Governance, vol. 18, no. 1, 2012). Her publications also include ‘Friends, Fellows, and Foes: A New Framework for Studying Relational Peace’ (International Studies Review, 2020, with Johanna Söderström and Malin Åkebo), ‘Grasping the Empirical Realities of Peace in Post-War Northern Mitrovica’ (Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, vol. 4, no. 2–3, 2019, 239–259, with Sandra Segall) and ‘From Words to Deeds: The Implementation of Power-Sharing Pacts in Peace Accords’ (Conflict Management and Peace Science, vol. 25, no. 3, 2008, 206–223, with Desirée Nilsson).