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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2020
Today we live in a world where the majority of wars are no longer interstate, a development that over the last few decades has often left the international community, in particular the United Nations as it was originally conceived, ill equipped to respond. The nimble action required for contemporary conflict resolution and peacebuilding now primarily lies in the hands of local actors and states, sometimes supported by international actors. But it is not always clear who these local actors are or what they need in order to achieve sustainable peace. As part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” this essay looks in more detail at what we mean by “local” in conflict-affected contexts and asks how local is local enough when resolving conflicts and building peace. It identifies tensions and concerns such as the need for the international community to have a well-defined and easily identified “local agenda” when, in reality, there are often several competing local agendas. The essay presents the Everyday Peace Indicators project as a vehicle that can be used to help communicate these local needs to international actors, and argues for the importance of understanding people's perceived realities in addition to, if not more than, their actual realities when trying to understand peace and conflict trends. In order to do this, we need to more effectively problematize peacebuilding for positive conflict disruption.
1 John F. Kennedy, “Address to the United Nations General Assembly,” September 20, 1963, www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19630920.
2 Bellamy, Alex J., World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It ) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 93Google Scholar.
3 Article 1, Charter of the United Nations, ch. 1.
4 Richmond, Oliver P., “De-Romanticising the Local, De-Mystifying the International: Hybridity in Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands,” Pacific Review 24, no. 1 (March 2011), pp. 115–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote at p. 117.
5 Cobb, Sara B., Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Bourgois, Philipe I., eds., Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, vol. 5 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 21Google Scholar.
7 For more information, visit the project website for Everyday Peace Indicators at everydaypeaceindicators.org. This project has been funded since its inception in 2012 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
8 The name of the project is “Social Cohesion and Reconciliation Project (SCORE) Collaborative Analysis of Reconciliation Dynamics tool (CARD).” EPI is conducting this project in collaboration with the United States Institute of Peace and USAID (the United States Agency for International Development).
9 Indicators are from EPI's SCORE CARD project and have been left in the original translation from Sinhala without additional editing in order to remain as close to the original meanings as possible. These unpublished indicators were compiled in Sri Lanka in 2018.
10 Ibid.
11 “Sustainable Development Goal 16,” Sustainable Development Goals Knowledge Platform, sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg16.
12 Durkheim, Émile, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014)Google Scholar.
13 Pamina Firchow and Eliza Urwin, “What Afghan Women (and Men) Really Want: Access to Employment and Education Are Local Priorities. Here's How the West Can Work with the Taliban to Ensure Those Rights,” Foreign Policy, May 9, 2019, foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/09/what-afghan-women-and-men-really-want/.
14 See Michael Barnett, Hunjoon Kim, Madalene O'Donnell, and Laura Sitea, “Peacebuilding: What Is in a Name?,” Global Governance 13, no. 1 (January 2007), p. 35. See also Randazzo, Elisa, “The Paradoxes of the ‘Everyday’: Scrutinising the Local Turn in Peace Building,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 8 (January 2016), pp. 1351–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Firchow, Pamina, Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ch. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 For more on conflict disruption, see Roger Mac Ginty's book Everyday Peace: How So-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), ch. 7.
17 Firchow, Reclaiming Everyday Peace.
18 Firchow, Pamina and Ginty, Roger Mac, “Measuring Peace: Comparability, Commensurability, and Complementarity Using Bottom-Up Indicators,” International Studies Review 19, no. 1 (March 2017), pp. 6–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Bellamy, World Peace, p. 89.
