Peacebuilding, foodways and the everyday: a fragile confidence in post-intervention Solomon Islands

Abstract

This article situates peace research in the messy ambiguities of everyday encounters between foreign peacebuilders and local populations in post‐conflict environments. It suggests that anthropology allows for moving the liberal/hybrid peace debate beyond its immediate boundaries – a focus on governance systems and the intervention itself – towards a more comprehensive examination of mundane experiences in shared places and their possible influence on peacebuilding processes. Specifically, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in post‐conflict and post‐intervention Solomon Islands and on anthropological research on the importance of food for identity formation, sociality and customary peacebuilding in Melanesia. By examining non‐elite Solomon Islanders’ perceptions of foreign interveners’ apparent rejection of Solomon Islands foods, the article shows how everyday ‘food‐based’ encounters between foreign peacebuilders and Solomon Islanders affect non‐elite Solomon Islanders’ confidence in long‐term peace and more broadly their value and status in the ‘modern’, global, liberal political economy.

Peacebuilding and conceptualisations of the local

“…They will remain tools that are supposed to make peacebuilding more effective, but do not (necessarily) see ‘the local in peacebuilding as a means of emancipation and inclusion of local agency’ (Leonardsson and Rudd : 825), in which outsiders act as supporters and bystanders only (Hellmüller : 3; Leonardsson and Rudd : 827). In this special section we touch on several ways and levels in and on which the local comes into peacebuilding discourses: with regard to traditional justice (see Bräuchler ), locally developed means to deal with civil war (Naucke ) or the neglect of local culture through outsiders (Hobbis ).…”