Current peacebuilding debates centre around the idea that international and local activities need to be better aligned. However, the distinction between 'local' and 'international' actors and processes obscures both power and interest differentials among actors and the various interconnections between international, national and local actors and discourses. This article proposes stakeholder analysis as a way to help understand power relations among various actors. This approach is applied to an empirical sample of land conflicts in Cambodia, in which local residents saw their livelihoods threatened by collusion between international private investors and national and local political interests. The findings suggest that building peace in insecure settings is not just a matter of harmonising approaches to strengthen the state with initiatives to support local groups. The reflex of international peacebuilders to strengthen the state and promote the rule of law overlooks the fact that governments may be unaccountable and laws may be illegitimate.
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Using a case study of Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN) in Cambodia, this article adds to emerging literature on local responses to land grabbing. While much of this literature has focused on political opportunity structures, this article looks at the agency of local groups organizing in response to land grabbing. Noting that organization and connections have been ‘missing links’ in the literature, the authors draw on thinking on collective action and social networking. Their findings highlight the importance of identity politics in the development of movements responding to land grabbing. Transnational discourses and external support also play a significant role in local responses to land grabbing in general, and in the modest success achieved by the PLCN in particular. All this complicates the traditional understanding of political opportunity structures and calls for a more dynamic approach.
Although important roles in peacebuilding are attributed to civil society (CS), few studies have so far analysed how CS actors fare amid ongoing war. Our empirical analysis of CS organisations in Yemen shows that their potential for peacebuilding is severely restrained not only by the security situation but also by political capture, corruption, and problems associated with foreign support. Our findings have implications for theories on CS and peacebuilding, which need to be adapted to messy realities in which boundaries between the state and non-state, civil and uncivil, and domestic and international domains are blurred. They also offer food for thought to peacebuilding donors, whose funds have inadvertently become encapsulated into a highly problematic political dynamic. However, the study shows that not all types of organisations are equally affected by political capture. Grassroots and new activist organisations, it argues, deserve more academic and policy attention as ways out of the Yemeni quagmire are sought.
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