Three locals of peace: a typology of local capacities for peace

Abstract

In recent thinking on peace, the ‘local’ has taken centre stage, carrying our last hopes after decades of ‘failed’ peacebuilding. The local can, however, denote quite a variety of different actors. How we select and define the kind of local to work with has huge implications. By developing a typology of three kinds of locals, this piece points to how installing the local as pivotal for establishing peace can take very different forms, implying vastly different policies. These different ways of conceptualising the role of the local, and what are seen as possible ways of engaging with the people who are at the receiving end of peacebuilding interventions, carry political value and reveal shifts in the political terrain of interventions. The article points to how engaging with locals might serve as an attempt at evading the political and ethical consequences of intervention, yet shows how such avoidance of political consequences fails by pointing to the political and ethical choices implied in choosing what kind of locals to work with.

Keywords:

• Peacebuilding
• local turn
• civil society
• United Nations
• prevention
• stabilisation

Acknowledgements

I thank Steffano Guzzini, Ulrik Pram Gad, Anders Wivel, Ole Waever, Christian Büeger, Jonas Fritzler, Kristin Eggelin, Troels Gauslå Engel, Anine Hagemann, Isabel Bramsen, Sara Dybris McQuaid and Minda Holm for generous and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research under Grant 4182-00277A: Addressing (Un)Civil Society in Mali: Threats to Security or Potentials for Peace?

Notes

1 Paffenholz (2010, 2014) provides noteworthy exceptions.

2 This NGOisaton has indeed become a widely discussed subject (eg Choudry and Kapoor, 2013). See also Kapoor’s apt critique of participatory frameworks in may ways paralleling the findings here (Kapoor, 2005).

3 For these points I am indebted to one of the reviewers.

4 This is not to obliterate the long history of military institution-building and assistance dating back to the colonial era throughout the Cold War and the 1990s emergence of ‘security-sector reform’ up to today.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research under Grant 4182-00277A: Addressing (Un)Civil Society in Mali: Threats to Security or Potentials for Peace?

Notes on contributors

Lise Philipsen

Lise Philipsen’s research focusses on the discrepancies between how peacebuilding is legitimised and how it is carried out in practice. In her work, she actively uses peacebuilders’ own experiences and reasonings to make sense of the peacebuilding encounter and the power structures and values at play in intervention settings. Her current research engages with how civil society, and particularly ‘un’-civil society, is addressed in integrated stabilisation frameworks.