An embodied everyday peace in the midst of violence

Abstract

Orthodox notions of peace built on liberal institutionalism have been critiqued for their lack of attention to the local and the people who populate these structures. The concept of an 'everyday peace' seeks to take into account the agency and activity of those frequently marginalised or excluded and use these experiences as the basis for a more responsive way of understanding peace. Further, reconceptualising and complicating a notion of 'everyday peace' as embodied recognises marginalised people as competent commentators and observers of their world, and capable of engaging with the practices, routines and radical events that shape their everyday resistances and peacebuilding.Peace, in this imagining, is not abstract, but built through everyday practices amidst violence.Young people, in particular, are often marginalised or rendered passive in discussions of the violences that affect them. In recognising this limited engagement, this paper responds through drawing on fieldwork conducted with conflict-affected young people in a peri-urban barrio community near Colombia's capital Bogota to forward a notion of an embodied everyday peace. This involves exploring the presence and voices of young people as stakeholders in a negotiation of what it means to build peace within daily experience in the context of local and broader violence and marginalisation. By centring young people's understandings of and contributions within the everyday, this paper responds to the inadequacies of liberal peacebuilding narratives, and forwards a more complex rendering of everyday peace as embodied.

Deploying Youth: Colombian Peacebuilding in Performance

“…This case example reiterates the significance of community structures in the lives of young people in Colombia (Berents ), and speaks to how peacebuilding practices are experienced and embodied by youth modeling creative alternatives to violence for broad publics (Berents ; Rodríguez ). With rap and debate relying on call and response interactions between multiple actors, this process also demonstrates the possibilities that emerge out of blending disparate dialogic processes to humanize conflicting voices.…”

“…In addition to liberal peace initiatives directed by the state and free market (Neufeldt ), which focus on governance, international law, and security (Richmond ), peacebuilding involves a constellation of activities that aim to repair devastated communities while interrogating the roots and impacts of violence (Neufeldt ) . Although the place of youth in peacebuilding has long been overlooked in academic literature, there has been a growing body of work in recent years that examines the roles young people play in constructing sustainable peace (Berents ; Borer, Darby, and McEvoy‐Levy ; Hayes‐Conroy and Montoya ; McEvoy‐Levy ; Pruitt ; Riaño‐Alcalá ). This article bridges conversations on performance, institutions, and peacebuilding to shed light on how NGO practices position urban youth as central to postaccord Colombia.…”

Mobilities and peace

“…It can be considered as a mobile form of peace. A substantial literature has emerged on 'everyday peace' or the ways in which individuals and communities navigate through division and insecurity using their own emotional intelligence and resources, and often independent of activities by states (Richmond, 2009: 580: Richmond, 2011bBerents 2015;Mac Ginty 2017). The focus of this article is on the everydayness of mobility and its implications for peace.…”

Building peace through systemic compassion

“…A second form of compassion‐practice in peacebuilding centers on the small‐scale activities of civilians engulfed in the tumult of large‐scale violence. Such activities fall within the domain of everyday peace, reflecting an emic perspective to peacebuilding (Berents, ; Mac Ginty & Firchow, ). Every day peace centers on actions that are drawn from a community's ethos regarding present imperatives and a vision of the future (Bar‐Tal, , p. 174).…”