The ‘local turn’ and notions of conflict and peacebuilding – Reflections on local peace committees in Burundi and eastern DR Congo

Abstract

Both political scientists and development practitioners express renewed interest in the 'local' in peacebuilding, and a need to better engage with local communities' concerns, perspectives and capacities. Developing scholarship highlights how such discourses essentialise the 'local', and obscure the role of interveners in its construction. This paper argues that thinking in terms of 'local' peacebuilding configures particular understandings of what conflict and peacebuilding entail. It depicts local conflict as something that can be addressed in isolation, and neutralises local peacebuilding agendas. Experiences of community-based peacebuilding in Burundi and eastern DR Congo instead show 'local' peacebuilders' pragmatic efforts to move beyond 'local' conflict, and significant local contestation about the kinds of peace, justice and social transformation envisaged. The paper concludes that a concern with the 'local' in peacebuilding may make interveners gloss over important contributions of so-called 'local' stakeholders to structural peace and state-formation, and so effectively disempower them.

The waxing and waning of ethnic boundaries: violence, peace and the ubwoko in Burundi

“…Neither is there a lot of attention, and thus money, going into initiatives that can more easily address these temporalities in formal or informal healing processes or cultural practices (Ingelaere & Kohlhagen 2012; Lambourne & Niyonzima 2016; Van Leeuwen et al . 2020).…”

Territorial healing: A spatial spiral weaving transformative reparation

“…Local peacebuilding encompasses the diffusion of power and recognition of local capacity, agency, and resistance. In this way, “community-based peace-work constitutes an important space for discussing visions on peace, justice and social transformation” (Leewen et al, 2020: 279). Therefore, a precondition for a sustained peacebuilding effort and its embedded trauma healing is considering local cultural values and decentralization processes (Lucuta, 2014; Staples, 2021).…”

Localisation Across the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus

“…This underlines the point that identification of the “local” as an untainted, pure category is problematic, for instance, due to elite capture of locally driven processes and the hybridisation of the “local”—whether governance, customs, or actors—with subnational, national, or international influences. A more typological approach to identifying local actors is important to “distinguish between community-based women groups, religious associations, or traditional authorities on the one hand, and formalised, capital-based civil-society organisations on the other” (Van Leeuwen et al, 2019, p. 4). To this we may add that municipal authorities and other forms of local-level governance are often missing in analyses of local-level conflict response.…”