Many international peacebuilding actors operate according to “unsupported, untested, and potentially flawed assumptions about peace, peacebuilding, and the role of outsiders and insiders” that fundamentally shape their interventions and can lead to less successful and even counterproductive local peacebuilding outcomes.
Local peacebuilding risks being co-opted by national-level elites who may benefit from a depoliticized focus on the local level—“interpersonal harmony and everyday interaction”—as it takes pressure off the need to address difficult national-level issues.
A Western ideal of “the local” can be a site of exclusion where local actors have different levels of power, enabling some locals to govern the conduct and participation of other, less powerful locals.
We are pleased to present our special issue on the relationship between local, national, and international peacebuilding in partnership with Peace Direct. The recent reorientation towards local peacebuilding represents a radical shift in whose voices are centered in the work of creating a more peaceful and just world. The grievances that lead to war are rarely, if ever, addressed through violence. Instead, after war these grievances persist, joined by the immeasurable loss of human life and the all-encompassing trauma, fear, polarization, and neglect that violence begets. When countries emerge from war, the very act of peacebuilding constitutes a rethinking of the social and political problems that gave rise to these grievances. It matters, therefore, that decision-making power in peacebuilding rest with those directly affected by these problems and their potential solutions.
The type of violence characterizing mass atrocities—ethnic identity-based violence or violence against political opponents—influences the effectiveness of different forms of intervention to mitigate mass atrocity violence.
Leadership decapitation is only effective at terminating a civil war without risk of recurrence when coupled with a military victory by the government, otherwise there is a good chance the rebel group will regroup and continue fighting at a later dat
The persisting environmental cooperation between the two Koreas in forestry is due to North Korea’s motivation to cooperate on environmental issues and the intermediary role played by South Korean and international non-state actors with ties to the South Korean government.
Peacebuilding efforts always take place within—and are deeply constrained by—the global conflict system, whereby violence and peace coexist and mutually reinforce one another both within and between countries, privileging the few (“at peace”) at the expense of the many (subject to “rampant” structural violence and cultural violence, as well as the direct violence to which these often give rise).
In Afghanistan, some women from “liberal democracies” report experiencing a “third gender”—whereby, if they act as equals to their male counterparts, they “are masculinized, and not real women but something else,” providing them with a measure of freedom and access in this context.
Arms transfers and military aid from foreign countries (collectively referred to as foreign security assistance) is associated with poor human rights conditions, including violations of physical integrity rights such as torture, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, political imprisonment and executions, and genocide/politicide.