Abstract
Conflict and related violence remain pervasive, impacting on communities both in the short term and across the longer term. Understanding factors that help to reduce conflict and violence at a local, regional and national level has become an important global policy priority. This edited book documents diverse experiences of peace building and asks why some people choose alternatives to violence. Rather than accepting that violence is inevitable, the contributors illustrate, that conflict can be prevented. Ransford, Volker, and Slutkin (Chapter 13) in particular point to the public health approach, which treats violence as a disease that can be monitored and prevented.
Factors driving and sustaining violence are peppered throughout the contributions. Robillard and Robillard (Chapter 2) for example document the experiences of communities vulnerable to local, regional and national influences. Subsequent chapters document these narratives of vulnerability, where frustration can lead to violent conflict. Several authors note that temporally, these social shifts coincide with significant socio-political changes as was the case documented in Chapter 14 by Groelsema et al. describing people during the third wave of democratisation across the continent of Africa during the 1990s. But as Chapter 12 argues, conflict is not limited to fragile states, the trauma of conflict and violence takes place across cultures and contexts.
In the midst of atrocities however, the book captures hope that emerges, often among those most affected. The Liberian example (Walker, Chapter 6) demonstrates the importance of local ownership even in the context of ratified peace accords with several chapters dealing with what it means to be local and how this ownership over peace is achieved. Interestingly, it is primarily in the penultimate chapter (Chapter 19) that Nixon asks the most pertinent questions around the concept of local but his observations follow 18 chapters that illustrate cases from Haiti, Uganda, Sri Lanka, England, Chicago, and Kenya. Robillard and Robillard (Chapter 2) suggest that local is a function of privilege, or lack thereof, with ‘local’ defined both geographically and temporally whilst also taking into account power relations. This is illustrated by Hill et al. (Chapter 9) who described a university partnership in Kurdistan, the importance of both physical and symbolic proximity as a means of reducing perceived power differentials and enhancing access.
Welty et al. (Chapter 4) suggest that if conflict is a shift in power ‘away from’, peace building shifts power ‘back to’ the local with Moix (Chapter 1) suggesting this is about individual agency and the decision to be different. However, as later contributions show, this dichotomy is overly simplistic. Roles are seldom fixed. For David and Ruano (Chapter 8) in the context of Guatemala and Hoffman (Chapter 17) who documented the Famul Tok (families talk) process following the conflict in Sierra Leone, victim and perpetrator roles often overlap.
A consistent theme is the reorientation of locals towards a new purpose and function captured well in Chapter 14 but the exclusive focus on the local is highlighted as problematic by those such as Dixon (Chapter 19) who suggest that whilst local peace building is part of the process of ending conflict, it is insufficient on its own. Chapter 17 suggests that peace building requires a bridge from the micro (community) to the macro (state) documenting the experience of Sri Lanka post 2015. Rather than a panacea, it is part of the whole requiring the support of government, evidence-based policy and in many cases, resources and support from the NGO sector. Chapter 7 illustrates the point using the example of Nigeria where early warning systems were used to inform policy. The nexus between the local, regional and national is mirrored in other chapters such as Chapter 18, in which the authors suggest violence prevention in Pakistan required multi-level approaches including leadership within the Madrasi systems to monitor progress and culturally component teams to engage with a variety of audiences.
Reducing violence is complex and maintaining peace is fragile. Whilst the aim of this edited book was to present narrative reflections, there is a growing challenge around how best to measure peace building as noted in Chapters 10 and 12. However, some contributors (e.g. Chapter 13) suggest that there are opportunities for the study of peace building to draw on decades of violence prevention study and approaches that have proven to be effective in practice.
The book represents a thoughtful and descriptive account of peace building from those engaged directly in the work. Just as with violence, peace building can be both expressive and instrumental. Despite small gains noted throughout the narrative, the expressive aspects of peace building are what Moix (Chapter 1) argues give rise to peace and it is through evolving social movements (see Chapter 2) that inspire a common vision and purpose.
If conflict is sustained through ‘othering’, these case studies illustrate that peace building can be achieved through ‘saming?’ (Chapter 16): as noted in Chapter 11 (p. 148) ‘identify[ing] the human being in the other person’ is critical to the reduction of violence and conflict.