https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6079-280X
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Abstract
Over the last 20 years the local domain has gained widespread attention in the analysis of peacebuilding. While this debate has contributed to an important review of many assumptions underlying peacebuilding practice and analysis, the subjective domain of peacebuilding – how actors experience and make sense of these transformations – still needs to be more methodically explored. In particular, while different narratives of peace have been analysed in this literature, much more rarely has there been a systematic discussion linking peace with power and violence and the different understandings and experiences around these two concepts. In this article I argue that integrating violence and power more systematically in the local turn and exploring their subjective domain can greatly benefit this debate, including by contributing to the elaboration of conceptual and theoretical tools more aligned with Southern epistemologies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgements
A previous version of this article was presented at the 1st International Conference on Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies at the Universidade Autônoma de Lisboa in November 2018. I would like to thank Teresa Cravo for her comments on that occasion. I am also extremely grateful for the detailed and critical comments from the two anonymous referees during the review process.
ORCID
Roberta Holanda Maschietto http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6079-280X
Notes
1 Maschietto, Beyond Peacebuilding.
2 Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace; Roberts, “Beyond the Metropolis?”; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building”; Lee and Özerdem, Local Ownership in International Peacebuilding; and Debiel et al., Peacebuilding in Crisis.
3 Nordstrom, Different Kind of War Story; Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo; and Millar, Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding.
4 Richmond, Transformation of Peace; Bräuchler, Cultural Dimension of Peace; Millar, Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding; Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding and the Locus of Legitimacy; and Roberts, “Beyond the Metropolis?”
5 eg Roberts, “Surveying South Sudan”; Robins, “Empirical Approach to Post-Conflict Legitimacy”; Millar, Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding; and Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives.”
6 Notable exceptions in the case of violence are Pearce, Violence, Power and Participation; Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo; Roque, Pós-Guerra?; and Luckham, “Whose Violence, Whose Security.”
7 Such as Galtung, “Social Cosmology”; Dietrich, Interpretations of Peace in History and Culture; and Pynn, “Dao De Jing on Cultivating Peace.”
8 Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn.”
9 Ibid.; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building”; and Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck, “Struggle Versus the Song.”
10 Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building”; and Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn.”
11 eg Kappler, “Dynamic Local”; Debiel and Rinck, “Rethinking the Local in Peacebuilding”; and Bräuchler and Naucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations of the Local.”
12 Boege et al., “Building Peace and Political Community”; Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,” and International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; and Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders.”
13 Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism”; Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn”; Debiel and Rinck, “Rethinking the Local in Peacebuilding”; and Bräuchler and Naucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations of the Local.”
14 Kent et al., “Introduction”; and Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders.”
15 eg Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo; Nilsson, “Peacebuilding and Local Ownership”; Maschietto, Beyond Peacebuilding; and Bräuchler, Cultural Dimension of Peace.
16 Paffenholz, “Peacebuilding Goes Local”; and Bräuchler and Naucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations of the Local.”
17 Kent et al., “Introduction,” 5.
18 eg Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,” and International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders”; Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace, Failed Statebuilding and “Paradox of Peace and Power”; Roberts, ed., Liberal Peacebuilding; and Lee and Özerdem, Local Ownership in International Peacebuilding.
19 Bräuchler and Naucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations of the Local.”
20 For instance, Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace”; Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building”; Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck, “Struggle Versus the Song”; Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn”; and Debiel et al., Peacebuilding in Crisis.
21 eg Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” and “Cultural Violence”; Pearce, Violence, Power and Participation, and “‘Violence Turn’ in Peace Studies and Practice”; Autesserre, Trouble with the Congo; Roque, Pós-Guerra?; and Luckham, “Whose Violence, Whose Security.”
22 Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace and “Paradox of Peace and Power”; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building”; and Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace.”
23 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building”; and Richmond, “Paradox of Peace and Power.”
24 See detailed discussion in Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace.
25 Krause, “Reforming the Security Sector.”
26 Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck, “Struggle Versus the Song”; Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn”; and Debiel and Rinck, “Rethinking the Local in Peacebuilding.”
27 Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives”; Maschietto, “What Has Changed with Peace”; and Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding and the Locus of Legitimacy.
28 Richmond, Transformation of Peace.
29 Ibid.; and Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace.
30 Richmond, Transformation of Peace; Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace.
31 Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace; and Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building.”
32 Galtung, “Social Cosmology”; Dietrich, “Farewell to the One Peace” and Interpretations of Peace; Pynn, “Dao De Jing on Cultivating Peace”; and Rummel, Understanding Conflict and War.
33 Galtung, “Social Cosmology,” 184.
34 Ibid., 191.
35 Dietrich, Interpretations of Peace in History and Culture.
36 Ibid.
37 Dietrich, “Farewell to the One Peace,” 152.
38 Dietrich, Interpretations of Peace in History and Culture, 274.
39 Ibid., 20.
40 Ibid., 40.
41 See also Pynn, “Dao De Jing on Cultivating Peace.”
42 Bose, “Gandhian Perspective on Peace.”
43 Richmond, Failed Statebuilding, 185.
44 eg Suhrke and Berdal, eds., Peace in Between; Boyle, Violence after War; and Kurtenbach and Wulf, Violence and Security Concerns.
45 Key references in the social sciences include Das et al., Violence and Subjectivity; and Scheper-Hughes and Bourgoius, eds., Violence in War and Peace. In the case of peacebuilding, see discussion in Pearce, “‘Violence Turn’ in Peace Studies and Practice”; Roque, Pós-Guerra?; and Luckham, “Whose Violence, Whose Security.”
46 Lind and Luckham, “Introduction: Security in the Vernacular,” 90.
47 Luckham, “Whose Violence, Whose Security,” 99.
48 Ibid., 99.
49 A notorious case was the assassination of Gilles Cistac, a Franco-Mozambican constitutional lawyer and professor who was murdered in 2015, after publicly acknowledging that Renamo’s claim to create autonomous provincial governments in the provinces where it won the general elections was not unconstitutional.
50 Serra, Linchamentos em Moçambique.
51 More recently, the very conflict that ended in 1992 was resumed in 2013, when Renamo called off the peace agreements and engaged in a series of attacks in central Mozambique. The conflict was labelled as low intensity, and a peace deal was signed in August 2019, ahead of the forthcoming presidential elections. The resumption of arms brought back to the table the many unresolved issues since 1992. Adding to this, a recent facet of violence, starting in 2017, has been the series of attacks from a militant Islamist group in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.
52 Bertelsen, Violent Becomings.
53 Ibid., 3.
54 Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace”; Richmond, Post-Liberal Peace and “Paradox of Peace and Power”; and Mac Ginty and Richmond, “Local Turn in Peace Building.”
55 See discussion in Richmond, “Paradox of Peace and Power.”
56 Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace.”
57 Richmond, “Paradox of Peace and Power.”
58 As the famous ‘institutionalisation before liberalisation’ proposed by Paris, At War’s End.
59 For critical analyses of these processes see Morier-Genoud, “Mozambique since Citation1989”; Maschietto, Beyond Peacebuilding; and Weimer, Moçambique: Descentralizar o Centralismo.
60 See discussion in Adalima and Nuvunga, “Participação da Sociedade Civil”; Francisco and Matter, Poverty Observatory in Mozambique; and Maschietto, Beyond Peacebuilding.
61 Forquilha and Orre, “Conselhos Locais.”
62 Maschietto, Beyond Peacebuilding.
63 Carroll, “Peace Research: The Cult of Power”; Boulding, Three Faces of Power; Karlberg, “Power of Discourse”; Francis, From Pacification to Peacebuilding; and Pearce, “Power and the Twenty-First Century Activist.”
64 See discussion in Boulding, Three Faces of Power; Francis, From Pacification to Peacebuilding; Carroll, “Peace Research: The Cult of Power”; and Karlberg, “Power of Discourse.”
65 Pearce, “Power and the Twenty-First Century Activist,” 661. See also Pearce, Violence, Power and Participation.
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Roberta Holanda Maschietto
Roberta Holanda Maschietto is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. She has a PhD in peace studies from the University of Bradford. Her current research focuses on understanding local subjectivities of peace, violence and power in Mozambique and Timor-Leste. She has previously investigated the dynamics of empowerment promotion in Mozambique in the context of peacebuilding, leading to the publication of the book Beyond Peacebuilding. The Challenges of Empowerment Promotion in Mozambique.