Everyday Peace
How So-called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict
ROGER MAC GINTY
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mac Ginty, Roger, 1970– author.
Title: Everyday peace : how so-called ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict / Roger Mac Ginty.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021010356 (print) | LCCN 2021010357 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197563397 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197563410 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Peace-building. | Peace. | Conflict management. Classification: LCC JZ5538 .M327 2021 (print) | LCC JZ5538 (ebook) | DDC 303.6/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010356 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010357
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197563397.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
This book is dedicated to my brother, Manus Mac Ginty, 1967–2019
List of Figures and Table
Figure 1.1. Circuitry in a conflict-affected country. 46
Figure 2.1. Everyday peace continuum. 55
Table 6.1. Percentage of female representation in post-peace-accord lower chambers at five-year intervals. 170
Acknowledgements
Completion of this manuscript is about seven years late, a fact not unrelated to having a seven-year-old daughter, Flora. The book is dedicated to my brother, Manus Mac Ginty, who died much too young. He loved his family, the outdoors, and storytelling. I miss him very much.
Many debts were incurred in writing this book. Alex Bellamy, John Brewer, Nemanja Džuverović, Pamina Firchow, Marsha Henry, Laura Mcleod, Eric Lepp, Ben Rampton, Oliver Richmond, Tom Rodwell, and Mandy Turner all read sections of the book or provided help with literature. Conversations with Tatsushi Arai, Séverine Autesserre, Christine Bell, Morten Bøås, Roddy Brett, Kris Brown, Christine Cheng, David Ellery, Larissa Fast, Landon Hancock, Chip Hauss, Stefanie Kappler, Walt Kilroy, Sung Yong Lee, Alp Özerdem, Michelle Parlevliet, Jan Pospisil, Gearoid Miller, Sarah Njeri, Stefano Ruzza, Elena Stavrevska, Anthony Wanis St. John, Gëzim Visoka, Birte Vogel, Andrew Williams, and Susan Woodward also helped clarify thinking and provided encouragement. At Durham, a “Conflict +” seminar spent an invaluable few hours discussing chapter 6; thanks are due to Emil Archambault, Olga Demetriou, Elisabeth Kirtslogou, and Nayanika Mookherjee. My wonderful PhD students, and successive Masters classes, also provided a great sounding board. Alex De Waal provided access to African Union data on security incidents.
Much of the stimulus for this book came from the Everyday Peace Indicators project, and I have been fortunate to work alongside the indefatigable and ever supportive Pamina Firchow for many years. I have been privileged to learn from Everyday Peace Indicators colleagues Peter Dixon, Naomi Levy, Lindsay McClain Opiyo, Jessica Smith, and Zach Tilton. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has provided patient and generous support to the Everyday Peace Indicators project, and I am particularly grateful to Aaron Stanley and Stephen Del Rosso. I also acknowledge support from the Economic and Social Research Council in the form of a grant to work on peacekeeping data.
Ideas in the book were honed at papers given at the universities of Amsterdam, the Arctic, Belgrade, Bradford, Bristol, Durham, George Mason, Kent State, King’s College London, Leeds Beckett, Queen Mary, Manitoba, Newcastle, Notre Dame, St. Andrews, Turin, and York. I am grateful for the hospitality and the questions.
I benefited enormously from encouragement and advice from the editors of the Oxford University Press series Studies in Strategic Peacemaking—Scott
Appleby, John Paul Lederach, and Daniel Philpott, all at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I am very grateful to David McBride and Holly Mitchell at Oxford University Press for their guidance. The anonymous reviewers managed to perfect the balance between encouragement and gently pointing out the holes in the argument.
I am also grateful to the community I live in and the distractions it provides. I appointed myself “writer in residence” in the cafe bus at the Chain Bridge Honey Farm. Not a word of this book could have been written without the support of Mrs. Mac Ginty. Everyone needs a Mrs. Mac Ginty. Thanks are also due to Patrick, Edward, and Elisabeth Mac Ginty.
This is the book I wanted to write, and I am grateful for having the opportunity to do so.
Abbreviations
CVE countering violent extremism
DUP Democratic Unionist Party
EPI Everyday Peace Indicators
EPP Everyday Peace Power
IFI international financial institution
IHL international humanitarian law
INGO international non-governmental organisation
IRA Irish Republican Army
ISAF International Security Assistance Force
LRA Lord’s Resistance Army
POW prisoner of war
SGBV sexual and gender-based violence
SS Schutzstaffel
UNAMID United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur
Introduction
During the height of its violent campaign, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted and brutalised thousands of children in northern Uganda, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many of these children were turned into child soldiers and sex slaves. Over time, and especially as the LRA suffered from battlefield setbacks, many of the former child soldiers and sex slaves returned to their villages. Naturally, many of the villagers were suspicious, even fearful, that people responsible for atrocities would be living in their midst. But as research conducted by the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) project has indicated, many villagers were sanguine and pragmatic. According to one male focus group participant, ‘We need help for the formerly abducted persons. They have returned home but they have nowhere to start from. If possible, they should be helped to start their life afresh’.1 A female in another focus group remarked, ‘You forgive because it was not their will to be abducted’,2 while a participant in a youth focus group showed remarkable understanding: ‘Formerly abducted persons are being stigmatised . . . because some of them have AIDS that they acquired while in captivity’.3 This quiet acceptance at the level of individuals or groups of individuals can be regarded as everyday peace, or a way in which community members use their own agency to navigate through potentially awkward situations.
Attitudes and actions like those described above lie at the heart of everyday peace and are the focus of this book. The peace forged between a villager and a returning child soldier is unlikely to rely on ministrations by civil society organisations or on the peacebuilding theories found in a book like this one. Instead, they depend on common sense, pragmatism, and an understanding that if space is to be shared, then accommodations have to be made. Importantly, these forms of peace are demonstrable and help us illustrate the varieties and texture of peace. Another example of everyday peace comes from Sudan in April 2019, when protesters against long-term Sudanese ruler Omar al-Bashir came under attack from a government militia. A small group of soldiers—just a handful—stepped in to protect the civilians from attack.4 The actions of the soldiers were not sanctioned
1 Male focus group, EPI project, Attiak, northern Uganda, 4 October 2013.
2 Female focus group, EPI project, Attiak, northern Uganda, 12 November 2013.
3 Youth focus group, EPI project, Attiak, northern Uganda, 4 October 2013.
4 Borzou Daragahi, ‘Clashes between Rival Sudan Armed Forces Risk “Civil War”, Protesters Warn,’ Independent, 10 April 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/sudan-civilwar-omar-al-bashir-khartoum-bouteflika-a8863881.html.
Everyday Peace. Roger Mac Ginty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197563397.003.0001
from above. Instead, the soldiers acted on the spur of the moment, showing humanity and a concern for the rights of fellow citizens. This small act had enormous repercussions in that it showed that the military was not completely loyal to al-Bashir and that some members, if made to choose between their fellow citizens and an autocrat who had been in power for thirty years, would choose the former. The micro-action, just a small act in the midst of a wider situation, was pivotal in the ousting of al-Bashir. It showed the capacity of a micro-act to scale up and have implications far beyond the original act.
Or take a third example. In the midst of a battle in World War II, a British infantryman found himself face to face with a German tank: ‘I turned to see a Mark IV tank only a few yards behind us with his machine gun still aimed and smoking. I tensed myself for the inevitable, but he held his fire . . . he released the trigger and I lived to tell the tale’.5
The surviving soldier had been saved by a split-second decision by the machine-gunner in the tank. The incident did not change the course of the war, but it did change the soldier’s life, allowing him to live for another seventy years, have a family, and set up a flourishing business.6 Although it was momentary, the spontaneous act of compassion was pro-peace and pro-social and can be categorised as everyday peace in the context of war.
This book is about the capacity of so-called ordinary people to disrupt violent conflict and forge pro-social relationships in conflict-affected societies. It is concerned with small acts of peace, termed here everyday peace, that have the capacity to disrupt conflict and possibly grow into something more substantial. It is interested in the scaling-up potential of grassroots actions and stances by individuals and groups of individuals whose actions can have a ripple effect—and just possibly a tsunami effect. The book argues that there is often a precursor stage to conflict management, resolution, and transformation: conflict disruption. The book investigates the disruptive and pacific potential of so-called ordinary people in situations of conflict and division. It unpacks—conceptually and empirically—the everyday peace that so-called ordinary people use to navigate through life in societies affected by violent conflict. It is interested in the ‘peace’ that is on display when Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland share the same workplace or when Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria use the same marketplace. This everyday peace is far removed from the ‘big peace’ of peace accords and symbolic gestures by political leaders.7 Instead, it
5 Ray Ellis, Once a Hussar: A Memoir of Battle, Capture and Escape in the Second World War, Kindle ed. (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2013), chap. 11.
6 Melissa Hills, ‘Last Hero of the WWII Battle of Gazala in Libya Dies at Age 94’, Daily Express, 24 February 2014, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/461440/ Last-hero-of-the-WWII-Battle-of-Gazala-in-Libya-dies-at-age-94.
7 Herbert V. Evatt, ‘Risks of a Big-Power Peace’, Foreign Affairs 24 (1946): 195–209.
is the stuff of everyday life—the actions and thoughts that constitute how we embody and live life as individuals, families, and communities. Rather than occurring in diplomatic capitals in front of the world’s media, it occurs at tram stops, in the stairwells of apartment buildings, and in the line at the bakery in societies in which there may be conflict or intergroup tension. It can even occur on the battlefield with combatants showing mercy and compassion to apparent enemies. As these examples show, this book is concerned with interpersonal and small-group peace that occurs at the level below civil society organisations and formally organised pro-peace groups. Thus, the book is interested in levels below excellent works on peacebuilding—such as Séverine Autesserre’s Peaceland or Oliver Richmond’s Failed Statebuilding which tend to concentrate on international interveners and organised peacebuilding.8 It is also the level below the ‘middle range leadership’ identified by John Paul Lederach as often crucial in peacebuilding endeavours.9 This book is anxious to break through the ‘concrete floor’ to see a level that is often overlooked by many analyses: the individual, the family, the friendship network, neighbours, or work colleagues, rather than peace groups or civil society organisations. As a result, the book moves beyond political science and international relations analyses and draws on more sociological views of peace and conflict. Thus, it looks beyond an orthodox gaze on states and formal institutions in order to take note of the personal, the informal, the hyper-local, and the relational. While international relations and political science have made attempts to tackle their ethnocentrism, sometimes we have to move on.10 Crucially, as is argued in this book, a top-down peace can only reach its potential if it is given life through bottom-up enactments and embodiment. Capturing these acts and embodiments requires lenses inflected by sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.
For understandable reasons, top-down peace receives much attention. In the right circumstances, it is capable of providing the physical, psychological, and legal security that enables other types of peace to take root. For this top-down peace to become real or meaningful, however, it must be reflected in how people live their lives—in the routes they take to school, in their cultural activities and friendship networks, and in how they navigate through the awkwardness and potential dangers of a society transitioning away from violent conflict. As a result, this book is very much interested in issues of scale and how top-down
8 Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Oliver P. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
9 John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Process, 2002), 39.
10 George Lawson and Robbie Shilliam, ‘Sociology and International Relations: Legacies and Prospects’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23, no. 1 (2010): 69–86.
and bottom-up approaches to peace (and all the approaches in between) might interact.11
The notion and practice of everyday peace provokes three questions: Is it really peace? How can everyday peace deal with and confront power? Can everyday peace be scaled up? This book attempts to answer those questions. The first, question—is it really peace?—can be answered in the affirmative. Christians and Muslims in Ambon Province in Indonesia may live side by side, but they may do so in grudging toleration—apparently a mere coexistence or negative peace.12 This is far removed from effusive and emancipatory forms of peace, and it is understandable if everyday peace faces questions regarding its pacific nature. Yet the circumstances of conflict and deep societal divisions often do not allow for anything more than tolerance or the acceptance that individuals from ‘the other side’ have a right to coexist in a shared space. While this might be a very limited form of peace, it often requires considerable bravery on the part of those who engage in it, and so it is a mindset and behaviour worthy of serious study. Moreover, this everyday peace has the capacity, under certain circumstances, to disrupt conflict and develop into something more significant. It can be thought of in terms of the first and last peace. It is the first peace in the sense of the first tentative steps towards accommodation as a violent conflict comes to a close, and it is the last peace in terms of the last intergroup contact to survive as societies slip towards violent conflict. For example, it might take the form of a Guji farmer retaining, or re-establishing, links with a Gedeo trader in southern Ethiopia in the midst of wider communal unrest. Such links may not sound significant, but they do deserve labels associated with the word peace. Moreover, the argument of this book is that everyday peace has the capacity, under certain circumstances, to scale up. Cumulative small acts often can have larger outcomes in terms of preventing conflicts from escalating and in saving or protecting lives. By disrupting the narrative and logic of conflict, small acts of everyday peace can create space for civility, reciprocity, solidarity, and possibly more expansive concepts such as reconciliation. They can become agonistic peace in the sense of a positive societal dynamic in which problems can be acknowledged and possibly dealt with.13
11 Maire A. Dugan, ‘A Nested Theory of Conflict’, A Leadership Journal: Women in Leadership 1: 15.
12 As Patrick M. Regan makes clear, the concepts of positive and negative peace originated with Quincy Wright and Fred Cottrell. Patrick M. Regan, ‘Bringing Peace Back In: Presidential Address to the Peace Science Society’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 31, no. 4 (2014): 346. See also Fred Cottrell, ‘Men Cry Peace’, in Research for Peace (Oslo: Institute for Social Research, 1954), 99–164; and Quincy Wright, ‘Criteria for Judging the Relevance of Researches on the Problems of Peace’, in Research for Peace (Oslo: Institute for Social Research, 1954), 3–98.
13 Karin Aggestam, Fabio Cristiano, and Lisa Strömbom, ‘Towards Agonistic Peacebuilding: Exploring the Antagonism-Agonism Nexus in the Middle East Peace Process’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 9 (2015): 1736–1753.
The second question—how can everyday peace confront power?—poses a serious challenge to the notion and practice of everyday peace. A Sinhala and a Tamil may live next to each other in Sri Lanka and have good neighbourly relations. Yet would this micro-level relationship be able to survive a worsening of political relations and a deteriorating security situation at the national level? The criticism is made that everyday peace is unable to offset the tremendous structural power that underpins conflict, nor can it offset the proximate power of men with guns. A friendship or working relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian may seem inconsequential in the context of much broader conflict and its power imbalances. Such critiques of everyday peace are indeed valid, and it is often the case that everyday peace occurs on the margins of society or under the radar. Yet it is argued in this book that everyday peace can be significant. Fundamentally, it can be seen as a form of power in its own right: Everyday Peace Power (EPP). It can disrupt dominant narratives and modes of thinking that normalise the sense of superiority that one group might have over another. Everyday peace might show that alternative approaches to intergroup behaviour are possible. As chapter 3 in particular will demonstrate, the notion of everyday peace requires us to think differently about power and move beyond coercive and material ideas of power to consider more sociological and positive views of power such as power from, power to, and power with.
The third question facing everyday peace—can it be scaled up?—is perhaps the most common question I face when giving talks on everyday peace. What happens to grassroots initiatives if they only stay at the grassroots? Everyday peace initiatives and stances may be so heavily localised that they have no wider significance. Certainly, this book focuses on the micro-processes that constitute everyday peace: the encounters in a workplace shared by Serbs and Croats, the studiedly neutral conversations between a Catholic and a Protestant in Northern Ireland, or the split-second battlefield decision to take a prisoner rather than pull the trigger. Yet all of these highly localised encounters take place in wider contexts. A key task facing this book is to connect the hyperlocal (a peace between neighbours in a specific place) with large-scale spaces such as the state, the international, and all levels in between. While a Shia and a Christian in Beirut might have good relations, clearly this relationship is nested with a much more complex set of political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Everyday peace may appear to occur within a localised ecosystem, but this is likely to be shaped by state, regional, international, and transnational contexts. These linkages—between the hyperlocal and all the other levels—are often difficult to see. A major part of this book aims to highlight the connectivities between the very local and other levels. To do this, the notion of circuitry is developed as an analytical device. It is argued that hyperlocal everyday peace acts and thinking can be conceptualised as micro-circuits that occur in larger circuits. Thus, while acts of everyday peace
and conflict disruption might be seen as hyperlocal and seemingly unconnected with wider events and processes, they are actually part of wider dynamics. More than this, EPP co-constitutes the wider circuits. It can disrupt them, provide alternatives to dominant narratives, and offer a means of escaping the logic of conflict and violence.
The central mission of this book is to explicate the concept and practices of everyday peace. It is argued that everyday peace constitutes the social glue that prevents fragile societies from tipping over the edge. It might be the first and last peace. As such, it has the capacity to disrupt violent conflict and create the space in which something more significant—such as conflict management, conflict resolution, or conflict transformation—can take place. Tolerance, coexistence, intergroup friendship, and recognition of minimal rights for the other side may not sound like an expansive peace, but they may constitute major advances given the violent ruptures that might have occurred. Importantly, while there is academic and practitioner focus on ‘scaling up’, everyday peace is often likely to ‘scale out’. That is, rather than directly scaling up and encountering power in the form of institutions, everyday peace is likely to scale out, or replicate horizontally and at localised levels. Scaling out can reach critical mass, or a level of participation or acknowledgement that shapes society and may make political and community leaders take note and possibly change behaviour.
Three Innovations
This book makes three claims to originality. Of course, it is worth questioning if any ideas can be novel on a planet occupied by humans for about two hundred thousand years. It is also worth noting the enormous debt owed to the peace practitioners and scholars who have provided the foundation for many of the ideas in this volume. These caveats aside, the first claim to originality is that the book unpacks the meanings of everyday peace in a sustained and detailed way. Key here is the identification of three core concepts that constitute everyday peace: sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity. Not all of them are present in all instances of everyday peace, but they form a repertoire that is drawn upon as circumstances permit. The concepts, which are explored in detail in chapter 2, remind us that everyday peace is a mode of reasoning as well as a series of actions and postures.14 Everyday peace can be considered as a way of sense-making and
14 See work by John Brewer on everyday peace as a mode of thinking as well as actions. Brewer’s work on the value of sociology to peace and conflict studies has been very influential in the writing of this book. See, for example, John D. Brewer et al., The Sociology of Everyday Life Peacebuilding (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and John D. Brewer, ‘Towards a Sociology of Compromise’, in The Sociology of Compromise after Conflict, ed. John D. Brewer (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 1–29.
reasoning that allows individuals and groups to accept (and even respect) those from the out-group. It involves emotional intelligence and may entail overriding the groupthink and hegemonic narratives that dominate the in-group. Everyday peace relies on ‘reading’ social situations, making judgements on whether it is safe to engage in particular activities, and pursuing a course of everyday diplomacy. The concepts of sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity help us understand the contingent nature of everyday peace and how it depends on the structural and proximate context. This, in turn, underscores the importance of power and how everyday peace—like other forms of peace—is subject to ‘power over’ or the ability of actors to exert power and influence over others. Yet, as explained above and explored in detail in chapter 3, everyday peace is a form of power in its own right, EPP. The conceptual exploration of the notion of everyday peace draws heavily on the EPI project and its findings from local communities in Colombia, Uganda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
A second innovation in the book is the use of circuitry as an analytical tool to understand the connections between the everyday peace that occurs at the hyperlocal level and other dynamics occurring at the levels above. Drawing on network theory and literature on biological and engineered circuits (for example, plant root systems and electronic circuit boards), the concept of circuitry allows us to see how everyday peace can be nested within, and can contribute to, a wider series of structures and processes. Circuits help explain the multi-scalar nature of peace and conflict and how apparently local, isolated, and one-off events fit within much broader patterns. This ties in with notions of conflicts as interlocking systems in which both actors and issues ‘can be connected through convergence of complex conflict dynamics’.15 Importantly, these networks or circuits are relational and embedded in a cultural context.16 One of the findings in the book is the hyperlocality of everyday peace as it follows the contours of everyday life; everyday peace is forged and maintained at the local level. The local level is embodied and enacted and thus takes form in the home and the immediate vicinity of the home, the commuting routes one might take, and the habitual and convenient spaces that one might frequent such as particular cafes, shops, or places of worship. Circuitry is a way of capturing the local as part of a series of wider networks and political economies. It allows us to address the issue of scaling up or the question of what happens if grassroots everyday peace just stays at the grassroots level. Circuitry encourages us to think of how power and information might flow (or be blocked) between different levels of our social and political ecologies. It also allows us to conceptualise how linkages might be
15 Ho-Won Jeong, Understanding Conflict and Conflict Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 122.
16 Mark Granovetter, ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510.
hidden, tenuous, and contingent. Here it is useful to go back to the example of the Sudanese soldiers who took a stand in favour of the protesters and against the militia. The soldiers were member of multiple circuits. Some of these circuits, most obviously the Sudanese armed forces, will be formal, but others, such as clan, family, or friendship networks, will be informal and not always visible. As will be developed later in the book, everyday peace does have the potential to scale out and scale up. Obviously, this is context-dependent, but, importantly, everyday peace is co-constitutive of contexts, and the notion of circuitry will help demonstrate how scaling out has the potential to develop into scaling up; scaling out became scaling up. A recurring question in this book is whether everyday peace, for example, acts of intergroup civility or kindness, can become ‘societalized’17 or generalised in the civil sphere.
The third innovation in the book is to unpack the notion of conflict disruption. At first glance, conflict disruption may seem of minor importance, especially if compared to more ambitious concepts such as conflict resolution or conflict transformation. Yet disrupting the narrative and calculus of violence and prejudice is an essential step in moving towards forms of peace. Everyday peace thinking and acts have the capacity to disrupt, not merely interrupt, conflict and create spaces in which other forms of peace may take root. The notion of conflict disruption, mentioned throughout the book but explored in detail in chapter 7, draws on literature from business and management that shows how orthodox business models are disrupted by start-ups that seek to develop new modes of operation. In a similar way, everyday peace can be seen as a disruptive force—indeed, a form of power EPP—that can circumvent existing modes of thinking and action that suggest that conflict is totalising or unavoidable. A good example of conflict disruption comes from the mutinous actions of substantial numbers of soldiers in the German, French, and Russian militaries towards the end of World War I. Their actions were important in making the existing mode of warfare unsustainable. Importantly, multiple small-scale acts had a cumulative impact.
What Is Everyday Peace?
Everyday peace is a series of actions and modes of thinking that people utilise to navigate through life in deeply divided and conflict-affected societies. It works at the intra- and intergroup levels and relies on emotional intelligence to ‘read’
17 This is a more positive view of societalization than found in Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘The Societalization of Social Problems: Church Pedophilia, Phone Hacking, and the Financial Crisis’, American Sociological Review 83, no. 6 (2018): 1049–1078.
social situations and act accordingly. In many ways, everyday peace is a coping mechanism and a survival strategy that may become internalised and naturalised into everyday life. It is a form of tactical agency that is enacted and embodied into how people behave, present themselves, and go about their daily business. It is socially learned behavior, with the family and close peer group often playing a significant role in this learning process. Importantly, and as argued by John Brewer and colleagues, everyday peace is not merely the actions and performativity that are found in daily interactions, but it is also a mode of reasoning.18 Everyday peace is a way of seeing the world, of ‘reading’ a social environment, and of rationalising a situation that might involve violence or the threat of violence. It relies on the deft use of a social infrastructure or a series of cultural, social, and economic networks that we use in our daily existence. These networks, and how we use and constitute them, are highly political.
Everyday peace is heavily context-dependent. In some circumstances, it will be impossible for individuals or groups to engage in everyday peace. There may be physical barriers to prevent intergroup contact (for example, as in Israel–Palestine or Georgia and South Ossetia), or levels of violence may mean that intergroup relations more or less evaporate. In such circumstances, showing friendship or familiarity with out-group members might attract the attention of gatekeepers and disciplinarians within one’s own community. There should be no expectation that individuals will be consistent in their everyday peace activities and thinking. Everyday peace may be a one-off ‘moment’ of compassion or empathy to an out-group member in a specific circumstance—even on the battlefield, as illustrated in chapter 5. It can be an enduring intergroup friendship or relationship that is singular. Those involved may hold generally negative views of other out-group members. It may take the form of self-realisation and self-actualisation over the long term, whereby an individual moderates his or her opinions. As interview material later in the book shows, some individuals who were radicalised during the Lebanese civil war came to regret their involvement and to interpret the world in a different way.
Everyday peace involves a series of social practices such as avoidance, a system of manners, telling and blame deferring that, taken together, constitute a survival strategy that individuals and groups use to avoid difficult situations.19 It involves a fleetness of foot, quick calculations, and a good deal of dissembling. That is, people might believe one thing but say another simply to avoid or defuse a tense situation. This indicates insincerity, but if the insincerity is for socially good purposes, then it can be justified. Indeed, all societies have scripted
18 Brewer et al., Sociology of Everyday Life.
19 Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies’, Security Dialogue 45, no. 6 (2014): 548–564.
social interchanges (just think of interactions with the waitstaff in a restaurant). In a deeply divided society, however, the script becomes important as individuals pursuing everyday peace strategies will avoid contentious topics in conversation and rely on the script of manners and civility to chart a way through interchanges. While individuals and groups may use a modulated and restrained script in their intergroup interchanges, they may fall back on the hidden transcript when interacting with members of the in-group—or certainly more zealous members of the in-group.20 The picture that emerges is of individuals and groups who draw on a wide repertoire of social skills and are adept at matching the social skill to the situation. The notion and practice of everyday peace encourage us to think of so-called ordinary people as skilled diplomats who are adaptable and alert to a changing environment. While many everyday peace activities are rational and based on self-preservation, some are pro-peace and pro-social. They might even hold the promise of disrupting conflict.
One can think of a Serb living in an apartment building in a town in Bosnia. In the morning, he may comment to his wife, who also identifies as Serbian, on something he hears on the radio news. The comment may be pejorative towards Bosnian Muslims, but as it is a comment made in the private space of the home, it can be considered part of the ‘hidden transcript’. Five minutes later, he may then meet a Bosnian Muslim neighbour on the shared stairwell of the apartment building and greet him convivially. The two may have known each other for years and realise that as they live in close proximity, cordial relations are prudent. The man may work as a bus driver. Here he must be ‘on guard’ and try—as far as possible—to keep his politics, identity, and opinions to himself. Thus, rather than risk offending a passenger, he will keep any conversations to neutral issues such as the weather or the heavy traffic. After work, he may meet up with fellow bus drivers for a drink. As this is likely to be a mixed-identity group, the conversation will again be modulated and will avoid, to the extent possible, issues that would make anyone in the group uncomfortable. On the way home, he might stop off at his brother’s apartment for a last drink. His brother might hold extreme sectarian views, but the man—simply wanting an easy life and not wishing to have a row with his brother—laughs at his sectarian jokes. The picture that emerges is of a social chameleon, an individual who is socially adept and capable of drawing on a repertoire of multiple modes of behavior depending on the circumstances.
In one reading, the activities of the man are contradictory and do not constitute peace. They are, at best, ambivalent and possibly even cowardly. The man is far removed from an activist or campaigner who wants to address the absence of intergroup reconciliation following the Dayton Accords. His actions and stances
20 James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
are, however, deeply embedded in the everyday and its ‘situational constraints’.21 They show a good deal of emotional intelligence and an ability to shift between modes of behavior and thinking. Importantly, and why they deserve the term peace, the man’s actions are not inflammatory. They recognise the tensions of a deeply divided society and the potential of injudicious actions and words to contribute to a worsening of relations between communities. The man’s behaviour is not an expansive type of peace, yet it shows social maturity and contributes to the functioning of society (albeit a society with considerable dysfunctions). In an optimum scenario, it could be that the man engages in more expansive intergroup activity as circumstances allow. His act of living—peacefully—in the same apartment block as Bosnian Muslims might encourage other Serbs to move in. Intergroup social mixing will involve multiple micro everyday actions and stances. It may not constitute a peace revolution, but for a society emerging from violent conflict, it may be significant. Again, in an optimum scenario, there may be a scaling out of everyday pro-social activities that may, over time, become more significant.
Why Is Everyday Peace Important?
There is no shortage of publications on peace and conflict. But works that drill down to understand the meanings and forms of peace are relatively rare. This book seeks to contribute to the relatively small corpus that unpacks the meanings of peace.22 It concentrates on a specific form of peace—everyday peace— that is more prevalent and significant than much of the extant literature would lead us to believe. With good reason, there is much attention on formal approaches to peace through peace processes, peace accords, and the actions of political leaders, states, and institutions.23 There is also significant, and deserved, attention to the work of civil society organisations, activists, and peacebuilding professionals who work to foster reconciliation and cement peace accords.24 This
21 Mark Granovetter, ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510.
22 See, for example, Gordon L. Anderson, ‘The Elusive Definition of Peace’, International Journal on World Peace 2, no. 3 (1985): 101–104; Paul Smoker, ‘Small Peace’, Journal of Peace Research 18, no. 2 (1981): 149–157; Royce Anderson, ‘A Definition of Peace’, Peace and Conflict 10, no. 2 (2004): 101–116.
23 See, for example, I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen, eds., Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997); Stephen J. Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens, eds., Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002); Chester H. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, eds., Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1999); and John Darby and Roger Mac Ginty, eds., The Management of Peace Processes (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000).
24 See, for example, Maria O’Reilly, Gendered Agency in War and Peace: Gender Justice and Women’s Activism in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Roberto
book is interested in the layers beneath formal peacebuilding. It is interested in the informal and the everyday, in civil society rather than civil society organisations. Civil society and civil society organisations may overlap considerably, but the former tends to be organic and unencumbered by logframes, annual reports, and the necessity to please donors. It operates through family and friendship networks and informal cultural and social gatherings. By focusing on everyday peace, the intention is to explore how peace, or situations approximating peace, are lived, enacted, embodied, and experienced in everyday life.
This section will restrict itself to six reasons everyday peace is important, although the list could be more extensive. The first reason, previously alluded to, is that everyday peace can be regarded as the first and last peace. It may be the first peace to follow a conflict or upsurge in violence. Local-level intergroup interaction may take the form of the resumption of trading or social relations between villagers in Rakhine State in Myanmar. Such relations may be tentative and possibly occur under the radar lest they are observed by the authorities or more militant members of the in-group. But such forms of everyday peace might be the beginning of wider intergroup relations that may pave the way for a normalisation of intergroup relations, and thus disrupt the conflict. They may be experimental confidence-building measures that give confidence to other individuals and groups. In other words, they might scale out. In time, intergroup relations may stabilise and normalise. Everyday peace may also be the last form of peace, in that some social, economic, and cultural relations between friends, business associates, and colleagues from differing identity groups may survive a worsening of tensions. The actions and voices of political and militant leaders, ethnic agitators, and mobs may work to increase violence and tension. Established cross-community patterns of social and economic relations may become unsafe or unwise as individuals retreat back into their own single-group contexts. Yet, depending on circumstances, some individuals and groups may be able to persist in having intergroup contact. This contact will most likely be fragile and contingent, but it may be the social glue required to prevent the total collapse of intergroup relations.25 It also helps puncture the notion, often favoured by political and military elites, that conflict is totalising and all-consuming and that there can be no dissent. As this book will reveal, charismatic community leaders are often able to dissuade ‘hotheads’ from inflammatory acts and disrupt
Belloni, ‘Shades of Orange and Green: Civil Society and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland’, in Social Capital and Peace-Building: Creating and Resolving Conflict with Trust and Social Networks, ed. Michaelene Cox (London: Routledge, 2009), 5–21.
25 Indeed, the positive impact of surviving intergroup social capital is a major finding of Adam Moore, Peacebuilding in Practice: Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
the narratives of political leaders who might seek to paint the out-group as irredeemable.
A second reason everyday peace is an important concept and practice is that it encourages us to look beyond formal, institutional, elitist, and male forms of peace. Given its very nature, everyday peace involves individuals and groups of individuals in all contexts and all stations of life. Formal and institutional approaches to peacemaking are usually dependent on male-dominated political and military elites. These are often exclusive forms of peacemaking that involve relatively small numbers of people—often based in the capital city or urban centres. Formal peace processes and peace accords are often based on the hope that the peace process will create a context that will allow individuals and groups to get on with life. In a sense, it is ‘trickle-down peace’. There is a hope that peace forged at the elite level will trickle down to the levels of society below and provide security and economic opportunities. Just like trickle-down economics,26 trickle-down peace is based on the hope that macro-level activities (such as reaching a peace accord) will stimulate and enable micro-level peace. In many cases, everyday peace will be dependent on top-down elite-level peace. But in many other cases, it is independent, or relatively independent, from the elitelevel peace. As Daniel Philpott observed in relation to justice processes after violent conflicts, we should be wary of any axiomatic link between elite-level peacemaking and results at other levels: ‘It is far from inevitable that the judicial punishment of war criminals will build stability, and peace, and give popular legitimacy to the rule of law, as the rehabilitation rationale claims it will’.27 Indeed, everyday peace may occur despite elite-level activities designed to encourage division. Everyday peace encourages us to look beyond elites, whether in-country political and militant elites or the peace professionals who work for international organisations and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs).28 It also encourages us to look beyond peace events, such as peace accord signing ceremonies or symbolic acts by political leaders, and instead focus on the multiple small acts of tolerance, coexistence, and even reconciliation that constitute social processes.29 As such, to focus on everyday peace can be regarded as part
26 It is worth noting that trickle-down economics has been subject to considerable critique. See, for example, Dierk Herzer and Sebastian Vollmer, ‘Rising Top Incomes Do Not Raise the Tide’, Journal of Policy Modelling 35, no. 4 (2013): 504–519.
27 Daniel Philpott, ‘Peace after Genocide’, First Things (2012): 41.
28 Vivienne Jabri refers to this as an ‘international civil service’ in The Post-Colonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Other in Late Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), 121.
29 On the difference between events and processes, see Róisín Read and Roger Mac Ginty, ‘The Temporal Dimension in Accounts of Violent Conflict: A Case Study from Darfur’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 11, no. 2 (2017): 147–165, esp. 152–156; and Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Political versus Sociological Time: The Fraught World of Timelines and Deadlines’, in Building Sustainable Peace: Timing and Sequencing of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding, ed. Arnim Langer and Graham K. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 15–31.
of the critique of orthodox approaches to peace.30 It can be seen as part of the ‘local turn’ in the study of peace and part of a move to put people at the centre of approaches to peace.31 It moves us beyond Newtonian logics of a peace deal automatically ushering in peace and instead encourages us to think of the agency of individuals and communities.
A third reason for the focus on everyday peace is that it encourages us to think about our levels of analysis. Everyday peace is enacted at the local or very local levels of the commute to work, the school playground, the cafe, or the beauty parlour. It encourages us to examine individuals, small groups, families, and communities. But clearly, these micro-levels of analysis are only one part of the equation. Everyday peace occurs within, and co-constitutes, wider contexts and spaces. Thus, our focus on the everyday recommends that we develop an awareness of how the everyday might be connected with the substate, national, international, and transnational levels and all levels in between. Work on multiscalar politics is well advanced in the field of political geography but less so in international relations and political science.32 This book argues that insights from biological and engineered circuitry offer a useful analytical tool with which to visualise and understand the connections between the hyperlocal and the everyday on the one hand and the national, international, transnational, and all levels in between on the other. Particularly helpful is the notion of circuits within circuits, and different orders of circuits, something that allows us to envisage how the hyperlocal might be located in wider systems. The notion of circuits allows us to think that everyday peace might be scaled up or out. Grassroots peace is significant in its own right, but what if it is restricted to the very local level? An argument in this book is that everyday peace matters, especially in terms of the quality of peace that develops; it can scale up and out and shape the character of the wider peacemaking context. While much of our focus is on the level below civil society, this should not be interpreted as a lack of concern with structures, institutions, and actors, such as states and international organisations, that might wield considerable power. The concept of circuitry allows us to see the
30 The critique of the liberal peace has spawned a substantial literature. Examples include David Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding and Global Governance: Beyond the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2011); Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, ‘Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj’, Journal of Democracy 14, no. 3 (2003): 60–74; Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
31 Hanna Leonardsson and Gustav Rudd, ‘The “Local Turn” in Peacebuilding: A Literature Review of Effective and Emancipatory Local Peacebuilding’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 5 (2015): 825–839; Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763–783; Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Where Is the Local? Critical Localism and Peacebuilding’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 5 (2015): 840–856.
32 Rachel Pain, ‘Everyday Terrorism: Connecting Domestic Violence to Global Terrorism’, Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 4 (2014): 531–550; and Jussi P. Laine, ‘The Multiscalar Production of Borders’, Geopolitics 21, no. 3 (2016): 465–482.
connections between levels and thus pursue avenues of critique beyond the local or the immediate subject of our gaze.
A fourth reason the study of everyday peace is important is that it suggests that we should take seriously highly localised and vernacular understandings of peace (and conflict).33 Experiences of peace and conflict are contextualised and personalised. As the research underpinning this book shows, these experiences often relate to the family and the home or the immediate vicinity of the home (see chapter 6). The social sciences and much policy work seek to understand social phenomena through abstraction and generalisation. While this has many sense-making advantages, it does iron out local variance, colour and granularity. A country or region deemed to be ‘at war’ may contain areas characterised by explicit violent conflict. It might also contain areas that are relatively peaceful and apparently removed from the conflict. There is a danger that the ‘at war’ narrative becomes hegemonic and masks a heterogeneity of experience. A focus on the everyday reminds us of the need to concentrate on aspects of life that might be mundane, hidden, and hard to access. Some aspects might be pacific or be uninvolved/uninterested in the conflict and the dominant narratives that reinforce it.34 It is worth remembering that many of those affected by violent conflicts are based in the global south, and so the local is likely to be subaltern and very probably equipped with minimal material resources.
A fifth reason to champion the study of everyday peace is that it encourages us to think about the methodologies we use, and the data sources we draw on, in order to understand how peace is actually enacted and embodied in the mundane interactions and thoughts that make up life. Peace and conflict studies is a well-tilled field, and the range of data and resources available has been growing. Yet accessing the everyday and hyperlocal can be difficult. Many dimensions of everyday peace operate behind closed doors, and in what might be thought of as the ‘private sphere’. It can take the form of a hidden transcript35 within the family or a small group of friends or of a one-off compassionate act in the midst of violent conflict. Finding the methodological tools to access such types of peace is difficult,36 and while attempts to decolonise our research are under way, they face immense structural barriers.37 Moreover, when everyday peace is conceptualised as a mode of reasoning—a stance or a position that might translate into
33 Roger Mac Ginty and Pamina Firchow, ‘Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Conflict’, Politics 36, no. 3 (2016): 308–323.
34 Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Between Resistance and Compliance: Non-participation and the Liberal Peace’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 6, no. 2 (2012): 167–187.
35 Scott, Domination
36 Pamina Firchow and Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Including Hard-to-Access Populations Using Mobile Phone Surveys and Participatory Indicators’, Sociological Methods and Review 49, no. 1 (2020): 133–160.
37 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 2012).
action only if circumstances allow—then it becomes difficult to access. This book is able to draw on data from the EPI project and a number of other projects (explained below) in an attempt to access the less obvious manifestations and narrations of everyday peace. While the everyday is everywhere, it is not always easy to access. The book also draws on war memoirs and personal diaries—a resource used with surprising rarity in peace and conflict studies—to access how people think through and rationalise everyday peace.
A final reason to take seriously the notion of everyday peace is that it entreats us to examine the concept of power and how it is operationalised in terms of how peace is enacted, embodied, and experienced. Peace, like other social phenomena, needs to be subject to a power analysis to ascertain who holds power, how it operates, and whether it can be transferred or shared. A power analysis allows us to understand the extent to which power operates in different ways and is gendered. Orthodox approaches to peace, perhaps through a peace process that results in a peace accord, might depend on quite traditional forms of power such as electoral power and the ability of the state or other actors to impose their will or order via a mix of coercion and incentives. Everyday peace, on the other hand, might rely on alternative sources of power that are embedded within society. Thus, for example, the power of family, elders, or charismatic individuals may come into play. This power might operate through the networks and social infrastructure that constitute everyday life in the cultural, economic, social, and familial domains. Such sources and types of power may not always be visible to outsiders, and innovative research methodologies may be required to access them. The key point is that our analyses of everyday peace are very much about power. As such, this is a potentially subversive research agenda that looks beyond traditional (overwhelmingly male and statist) forms of power to examine hidden and less obvious forms of power.
Origins, Sources, and Methodologies
With the benefit of hindsight, this book is the third in a trilogy I’ve written. The first book, No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes, examined top-down peace processes whereby conflicting parties, and interested international actors, collaborate to reach a peace accord and manage the conflict.38 The second book, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace, looked at the interface between top-down and bottom-up forms of
38 Roger Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2006).
