Rescuing Peacebuilding? Anthropology and Peace Formation

Abstract

International Relations (IR) and related social science disciplines focusing on peace and conflict studies have enabled a bureaucratic understanding of peacebuilding and a liberal form of peace. This has extended into a neoliberal type of statebuilding. There is now an impressive international architecture for peace, but its engagement with its subjects in everyday contexts has been less impressive. An earlier group of conflict researchers, grouped around John Burton and later A.J.R. Groom, have long argued that this is partly because IR has concentrated on elite power, problem-solving methodology and positivist epistemologies. It has failed to understand the dynamics, agency and hybridity of human society and institutions when it comes to peace, or that inequality is conflict inducing. Rescuing peacebuilding from neoliberal epistemological frameworks requires an anthropological and ethnographic sensitivity.

Japan’s Peacebuilding and Mid-Space Actors: A Bridge Between the West and the Rest

“…It examined in what way Japanese peacebuilding actors operated in three conflict-affected areas focusing on their relationship-building attempts with gatekeepers, and how Japanese actors were able to approach and collaborate with them. Throughout the journey, this chapter strove to clarify where Japan already holds its potential for becoming a 'hybrid peacebuilding facilitator', a bridge between the Western interventionists style of peacebuilding and the anthropological approaches indispensable for realising emancipatory peacebuilding (Uesugi 2018b;Richmond 2018).…”

“…Japan's own history of encounter with and infringement by the West, as well as its experience of post-war reconstruction under 'colonial arrogance' (Richmond 2018) of the US, has equipped Japan to refine international peacebuilding to be a more reflective and adaptive undertaking (de Coning 2018). Utilising its own experience of modernisation by adopting Western systems and adapting them to fit with the domestic context, Japan has projected itself as a great example of how to exploit outside intervention for its own advantage and prosperity.…”

Beyond Silence, Obstacle and Stigma: Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Peacebuilding

“…Critical approaches infer that peace needs to be fostered 'from below'; they are thus necessarily more open to 'local-local actors', 'infrapolitical' dimensions and indigenous 'resistance' to foreign interventions (Richmond 2012, 116-127). Some studies propose as a sine qua non condition for consolidating peace the need to investigate at the micro level and develop more detailed and 'anthropological' analyses of local contexts (Richmond 2018, Schierenbeck, 2015. Others suggest developing positive forms of 'hybrid peace' in which 'international' and 'local' actors shape and participate in a localised process of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016, Wallis, Jeffery and Kent 2016; see further, Bargués-Pedreny and Randazzo 2018).…”

Beyond Silence, Obstacle and Stigma: Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Peacebuilding

“…Critical approaches infer that peace needs to be fostered 'from below'; they are thus necessarily more open to 'local-local actors', 'infrapolitical' dimensions and indigenous 'resistance' to foreign interventions (Richmond 2012, 116-127). Some studies propose as a sine qua non condition for consolidating peace the need to investigate at the micro level and develop more detailed and 'anthropological' analyses of local contexts (Richmond 2018;Schierenbeck 2015). Others suggest developing positive forms of 'hybrid peace' in which 'international' and 'local' actors shape and participate in a localized process of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2016; Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent 2016; see further, Bargués-Pedreny and Randazzo 2018).…”