Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected societies

Abstract

This article is a conceptual scoping of the notion and practice of everyday peace, or the methods that individuals and groups use to navigate their way through life in deeply divided societies. It focuses on bottomup peace and survival strategies. The article locates everyday peace in the wider study of peace and conflict, and constructs a typology of the different types of social practice that constitute everyday peace. While aware of the limitations of the concept and the practice, the article argues that everyday peace can be an important building block of peace formation, especially as formal approaches to peacebuilding and statebuilding are often deficient. An enhanced form of everyday peace (everyday diplomacy) has the potential to go beyond conflict-calming measures to encompass more positive actions linked with conflict transformation. The article can also be read as an exploration of 'the local' and 'agency' in deeply divided societies. It provides a counterweight to accounts of conflict-affected societies that concentrate on top-down actors, formal institutions and conflict resolution 'professionals'. The apparent 'banality' of the everyday challenges us to think creatively about perspectives and methodologies that can capture it.

Reclaiming the local in EU peacebuilding: Effectiveness, ownership, and resistance

“…To be more precise, for them the local turn should call into question the liberal peace project and expose its limitations and pathologies. Consequently, critical approaches to the local turn explore the merits of non/post-liberal forms of peace such as indigenous (Mac Ginty, 2008), everyday (Mac Ginty, 2014), emancipatory (Richmond, 2009(Richmond, , 2012, and hybrid peace (Mac Ginty, 2011). Authors within this camp, however, disagree on how emancipatory is the local turn in the policy discourse.…”

Bi̇r Karşi Ayaklanma Yöntemi̇ Olarak Li̇beral Bariş İnşasinin Eleşti̇rel Anali̇zi̇: Afgani̇stan

“…Everyday social practices among the indigenous people include avoiding controversial and sensitive conversation topics, using ambiguity in representing oneself in inter-ethnic/religious contact, exercising ritualized politeness, and blaming outsider factors. With these practices, everyday peace accepts 'the bases of conflict and seeks to minimize the impact of conflict through toleration and coexistence ' (Mac Ginty, 2014). Especially for the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) process of peacebuilding and counterinsurgency campaigns, these kinds of practices gain importance.…”

Peace formation from below: The “mirëdita, dobar dan!” festival as an alternative to everyday nationalism

“…Mac Ginty () envisioned bottom‐up, everyday peace as operating along a continuum. On one end, we may identify local acts of individuals concerned with everyday survival and coping in divided communities; on the other end, we find the forms of everyday peace that Mac Ginty calls “everyday diplomacy.” Everyday diplomacy denotes “more activist form of people‐to‐people practice” (Mag Ginty, 2014, p. 560) by both groups and individuals.…”

“…The main question addressed is: What is the significance and contribution of studying the formation of such exchanges at the sub‐state level as alternative platforms challenging top‐down and everyday nationalism? This study, as an investigation of bottom‐up peace (Mac Ginty, ), will not only contribute to ongoing theoretical discussions of the nature of local peace initiatives as they aim to challenge nationalism but will also enrich the empirical evidence of bottom‐up initiatives for peace formation from the Western Balkans, as related to the case study of Kosovo–Serbia relations and beyond.…”