Local Infrastructures for Peace

The way “the local” had been interpreted led to contrasting top-down or bottom-up understandings of local infrastructures for peace. This chapter presents a reinterpretation of the relevance of infrastructures for peace from a practitioner’s perspective, considering past experiences and current theoretical debates. It argues for an appreciation of the complex, interlinked nature of global, national, and local conflicts and the necessity of flexible yet sustained and productive dialogue platforms at the points of frictional interactions at and between all these levels. The capacity to initiate and support such dialogue platforms where, crucially, local agency is respected is at the core of the approach that became known as “infrastructures for peace.”

Reconciliation and Peacebuilding

There is near universal agreement on the need for reconciliation following violent conflict, and yet the specific elements of what reconciliation involves, how it relates to wider peacebuilding processes, and how to achieve it remain contested. In the context of a growth in intrastate conflicts, this chapter outlines some of the key debates around reconciliation as a process or end-state and explores its key components or tasks. In addition, it describes the multilevel nature of reconciliation and the requirement to tailor interventions accordingly. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future paths of inquiry that might add greater clarity and nuance to the challenge of reconciliation after conflict.

Local Resistance and Hybrid Peace

Local resistance and hybrid peace have emerged as useful conceptual frameworks to capture the dynamic interaction between the stakeholders at international and local levels, as well as the forms of peacebuilding that develop as a result. This chapter examines a few major academic debates over these concepts by analyzing relevant examples from the peacebuilding programs in Cambodia. The chapter comprises three parts that will explain local actors’ resistance against externally driven peacebuilding, the process of hybridization, and the hybrid forms of peacebuilding. Each section will briefly introduce conventional debates on the relevant concept, and then demonstrate how each type of interaction materialized in the context of Cambodian peacebuilding.

The United Nations and the Responsibility to Rebuild

Peacebuilding and statebuilding were integral parts of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) when the principle was first articulated in 2001. But since 2005 they have developed quite separately, creating a gap between the theories and practices of protection and peacebuilding. The effects of this gap are not just theoretical but practical too. The UN’s failure to properly follow through with rebuilding support in Libya contributed to that country’s descent into chaos and civil war, especially after 2013. Likewise a failure to incorporate atrocity-prevention concerns into ongoing peacebuilding efforts in places like Sri Lanka and the Central African Republic meant that the UN’s field presences did not do all they could to prevent atrocities or protect vulnerable populations. This chapter examines the relationship between peacebuilding and R2P in the UN context. It shows how the two were conceived as being mutually supporting activities but were separated during the UN’s wider deliberations on reform. It describes the effects of this gap between peacebuilding and protection before arguing that the two agendas are closely aligned and should be integrated. And it points to practical work to ensure that atrocity prevention is mainstreamed into peacebuilding efforts, and vice versa.

Globalization of Peace

Conventional scholarship on peace and peacebuilding fail to consider how the capitalist world-system is implicated in the structural violence that fuels violent conflicts around the world. This helps to account for the widespread failures of state-led peacebuilding interventions. Although social movement and civil society actors are deemed critical to successful peacebuilding, they are typically denied meaningful roles in shaping these processes. Yet subaltern groups are critical agents pressing for attention to latent conflicts before they escalate into violent confrontations, and they work to reduce violent conflicts and their harmful effects on communities. By shifting our gaze from the realm of states and the interstate system, we see an array of forces working “from below” to articulate projects to transform social relations in ways that Oliver Richmond calls “peace formation.” Global human rights discourses have provided a unifying framework and focal point for these grassroots initiatives, which eschew mainstream notions of rights as formal protections for individuals while advancing new foundations for transformative peacebuilding based upon “people-centered human rights.”

Spaces of Peace

This chapter shows that war-making and peace-making “take place” and that sometimes the legacy of conflict obscures manifestations of peacebuilding. The analysis of a “bridge that divides” in the city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo and a “wall that unites” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, casts light on the benefits that a spatial reading of peace can provide to understand the ways in which spatial infrastructures are lived by the people who use them. The process of space-making (the generation of meanings from a material location) will help explain the agency that emerges by the creators, users, and inhabitants of (post)conflict spaces.

Religion and Peacebuilding

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and politics through the lens of religious peacebuilding. Instead of asking the usual question of what happens to politics when it is infused with religion, it explores what happens to religion when it becomes politicized. Politicized religion distorts the meaning and practice of religion, one consequence of which is to constrain the potential for religious peacebuilding. Instead of becoming part of the solution in conflict transformation, politicized religion becomes part of the problem. The chapter goes on to discuss the far greater role religion has played in transitional justice.

Liberal Internationalism

Since the end of the Cold War, peacebuilding operations have become an integral part of world politics—despite their continuing failures. This chapter provides an account of peacebuilding operations in practice and identifies cycles of failure and reform, namely the successful integration of peacebuilding into the fabric of the world order despite its continuing failures. It traces these dynamics back to the internal contradictions of liberalism and argues that the main function of peacebuilding operations lies in managing the tensions and contradictions inherent in a liberal world order. Peacebuilding—in one form or another—is therefore likely to persist for the duration of a liberal world order.

Peace Psychology

Peace psychology seeks to apply psychosocial principles to prevent and mitigate direct, structural, and cultural violence and promote harmony and equity in human relations. Two waves of peace psychology research and practice can be delineated. The first wave generated concepts, themes, and perspectives aimed at the prevention of nuclear war and mitigation of intractable conflicts characterized by repeated cycles of violence. The second wave enlarged the scope of peace psychology to include the amelioration of structural violence, the kind of violence that afflicts most of the world’s population and kills people slowly through the deprivation of life-extending human need satisfaction. The most recent iteration of the second wave addresses the cultural violence visited upon formerly colonized countries and calls for the development of theory and praxis informed by emancipatory methodologies.

Rising Powers and Peacebuilding

Over the past two decades, a number of states have risen to take on substantial roles in peacebuilding efforts across the globe. China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Turkey, among others, have become major players in their regions and beyond. This chapter analyzes how peacebuilding serves as the locus for these states to contest the rules underpinning the international order and to stake their claim to influence. These states have to date worked within the dominant liberal paradigm rather than revamping it; thus they have brought significant improvements in legitimacy and efficacy through their domestic experiences. The chapter identifies the commonalities that Southern rising powers apply to peacebuilding, as well as divergent characteristics that hamper its spread. It provides a definition of this class of states apt for analyzing their peace policies and crystallizes elements of a Southern-based rising-power contribution to global peace. Examples are given of how these states have sought to multilateralize their cooperation and act consistently within the United Nations. The analysis then takes a closer look at the practices of Brazil and India, two major rising powers from the Global South.