Suchergebnisse

Strengthening or even 'building' civil society has become a preoccupation of international development actors working in post-conflict settings. However, how to do so effectively remains a difficult and theoretically underexplored question. This article identifies two core challenges. The first is how to overcome the discrepancy between what international development actors aim to achieve in building civil society – namely the strengthening of the social contract between a state and its citizens – and strategies to achieve it that focus narrowly on local NGOs and on their roles in apolitical service delivery, leaving out the state. The second is how to take better account of the complexities of the local institutions and processes concerned, and the alternative forms of social contract that might come about. This article explores these challenges and recommends how debate and research might proceed.

Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) is a set of activities that forms part of the strategies for peacebuilding after civil war. DDR has become the standard way of addressing security threats in immediate post-conflict situations. However, DDR is designed to promote national security, rather than human or community security. This creates severe obstacles for success, if success is seen in terms of overall security promotion rather than defined merely by the number of arms collected and people demobilized. The reason is that if security at the community level is not improved, then people will be unable to abandon armed violence as a way of protection and of making a living. Disarmament in such a situation will probably be only temporary. Thus, it is a necessity for DDR to aim at community security. However, when community security becomes the aim, then this opens up questions about whether DDR is the most appropriate strategy. At best, it can be part of a more wide-ranging strategy, which in addition to top-down DDR programs also involves community-based activities. Altogether, such a holistic security promotion strategy should endeavor to make people and communities better able to protect themselves and to create a living that does not depend on war and violence. In other words, it should aim at making guns redundant 'Community-based' and 'Second-generation' DDR initiatives lend inspiration for such a wider security promotion approach. What they show is that the optimal approach is very context-specific. An analysis of the conflict, of local security mechanisms, and of the needs and capacities of communities, therefore, has to be the first step, despite the fact that this takes valuable time. Adapted from the source document.

Introduction: Peacebuilding through the lens of friction, Annika Björkdahl, Kristine Höglund, Gearold Millar, Jaïr van der Lijn, and Willemijn Verkoren . - 1. Frictional spaces: Transitional justice between the global and the local, Susanne Buckley Zistel . - 2. Respecting complexity: Compound friction and unpredictability in peacebuilding, Gearoid Millar . - 3. Frictional commemoration. Local agency and cosmopolitan politics at memorial sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, Johanna Mannergren Selimovic . - 4. Escaping Friction: Practices of creating non-frictional space in Sierra Leone, Lise Philipsen . - 5. Sites of Friction: Governance, identity and space in Mostar, Annika Björkdahl and Ivan Gusic . - 6. The imagined agent of peace: Frictions in peacebuilding through civil society strengthening, Willemijn Verkoren and Mathijs van Leeuwen . - 7. Friction over justice in post-war Sri Lanka: Actors in local-global encounters, Kristine Höglund and Camilla Orujela . - 8. The 'awkward' success of peacebuilding in Cambodia - creative and incomplete, unsustainable yet resilient, progressing but stalling, Joakim Öjendal and Sivhuoch Ou . - 9. Frictions in illusionstan: Engagement between the 'global' and the 'local' in Afghanistan's imagi-nation-building, Jair Van der Lijn . - 10. Connections for peace: Frictions in peacebuilding encounters in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sara Hellmuller . - 11. Problematising global-local dynamics in Timor-Leste, Maria Raquel Freire and Paula Duarte Lopes . - Conclusions: Peacebuilding and the significance of friction, Annika Björkdahl, Kristine Höglund, Gearold Millar, Jaïr van der Lijn, and Willemijn Verkoren

This book aims to understand the processes and outcomes that arise from frictional encounters in peacebuilding, when global and local forces meet. Building a sustainable peace after violent conflict is a process that entails competing ideas, political contestation and transformation of power relations. This volume develops the concept of 'friction'to better analyse the interplay between global ideas, actors, and practices, and their local counterparts. The chapters examine efforts undertaken to promote sustainable peace in a variety of locations, such as Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone. These case analyses provide a nuanced understanding not simply of local processes, or of the hybrid or mixed agencies, ideas, and processes that are generated, but of the complex interactions that unfold between all of these elements in the context of peacebuilding intervention. The analyses demonstrate how the ambivalent relationship between global and local actors leads to unintended and sometimes counterproductive results of peacebuilding interventions. The approach of this book, with its focus on friction as a conceptual tool, advances the peacebuilding research agenda and adds to two ongoing debates in the peacebuilding field; the debate on hybridity, and the debate on local agency and local ownership. In analysing frictional encounters this volume prepares the ground for a better understanding of the mixed impact peace initiatives have on post-conflict societies. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, security studies, and international relations in general.