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Abstract
This introduction presents how views on ‘the local turn’ in peacebuilding has evolved into a significant discourse. Currently, it has ‘its moment’ and is widely used by theorists and practitioners alike, by normative localists as well as by liberal policy-makers, albeit for different reasons and with differing intensions. We suggest that international interventions for the purpose of peacebuilding cannot be justified a priori, but requires resonance at the ‘receiving end’, which the local dimension potentially offers. It is however an elusive and contested concept that requires thorough scrutiny and critical assessment. Here a collection of conceptual and empirical articles is contextualised and introduced, painting a broad state-of-the-art of the pros and cons of the local turn.
Notes
1. Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry.
2. Cox, “Social Forces.”
3. Foucault, “Two Lectures.”
4. For a discussion of the relationship between these two bodies of work, see Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” 14–15.
5. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
6. See Dirlik, “The Global in the Local.”
7. Helman and Ratner, “Saving Failed States”; and Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.
8. Williams, Keywords, 87.
9. Clifford, “Introduction,” 10.
10. See, for example, Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter; and Hymes, Reinventing Anthropology.
11. Clifford, Routes.
12. Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference.”