Blessing or Burden? The Impact of Peace Services on Peace and Violence in Nepal

Abstract

Recent literature highlights the potential of infrastructures for peace for peacebuilding and violence prevention. An increasing number of studies examine cases of infrastructures for peace, yet little is known about the services individuals actually use when facing conflict. This study investigates local agency in the context of infrastructures for peace in Nepal. Adopting a quantitative approach, we explore the relationship between use of third party support for dealing with conflict (‘peace services’) and individual experiences of peace and violence. Results show that the more respondents reported use of services that actively engage their recipients in dealing with their conflicts, such as mediation, the more peace they experienced in different dimensions of their lives and the lower their propensity for violence was. In contrast, the more respondents reported use of services that require only passive involvement and do not directly focus on the conflict at hand, such as sharing information, the less intrapersonal and intercommunity peace they experienced and the higher their propensity for violence was. Encouraging the use of active peace services could allow more people to enjoy their benefits and ultimately prevent violence and strengthen peace. Future research could further explore the linkages between everyday use of third party support and people’s experience of peace and violent behaviour, including direction of effect.

Keywords:

• infrastructures
• peace
• violence
• services
• needs
• agency
• Nepal
• quantitative
• impact
• peacebuilding

Notes

1 The original sample size was 1,200, but 23 interviews were lost due to the Gorkha earthquake. This earthquake struck Kathmandu and surrounding districts on 25 April 2015. With a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale, it killed 9,000 people and destroyed more than 500,000 homes. Hundreds of aftershocks with a magnitude higher than 4 followed.

2 For instance, we asked which institutions help to prevent violence in the community; who in the community is advocating against discrimination and exclusion; and how many times the respondents experienced a dispute with a government agency in the last two years.

3 We did not identify a previous operationalisation of the ‘for peace’ part of ‘infrastructures for peace’ (the needs-side) in the literature on infrastructures for peace.

4 Two well-known instruments, the Global Peace Index and the Pillars of Peace framework, measure negative and positive peace from the national rather than individual perspective.

5 We changed the wording of the two categories ‘intragroup’ and ‘intergroup’ dimensions of human interaction identified by Cheldelin et al. (2003) to ‘intercommunity’ and ‘citizen-state’ to more adequately capture the content of the indicators.

6 This included adjustments to the wording of items to ensure that they would be effectively understood. For example, the Buss-Perry aggression scale item ‘some of my friends think I’m a hothead’ was rephrased to ‘some of my friends think I quickly become angry’.

7 For example, we transformed all self-report statements to interview-style questions because the former created confusion, and offered the respondents financial compensation to prevent impatience with the duration of the questionnaire from becoming a problem in the main study.

8 Using Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Promax Rotation.

9 Additional statistical information is available from the authors upon request.