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"Bringing armed conflicts to an end is difficult; restoring a lasting peace can be considerably harder. Reclaiming Everyday Peace addresses the effectiveness and impact of local level interventions on communities affected by war. Using an innovative methodology to generate participatory numbers, Pamina Firchow finds that communities saturated with external interventions after war do not have substantive higher levels of peacefulness according to community-defined indicators of peace than those with lower levels of interventions. These findings suggest that current international peacebuilding efforts are not very effective at achieving peace by local standards because disproportionate attention is paid to reconstruction, governance and development assistance with little attention paid to community ties and healing. Firchow argues that a more bottom up approach to measuring the effectiveness of peacebuilding is required. By finding ways to effectively communicate local community needs and priorities to the international community, efforts to create an atmosphere for an enduring peace are possible"...

AbstractToday we live in a world where the majority of wars are no longer interstate, a development that over the last few decades has often left the international community, in particular the United Nations as it was originally conceived, ill equipped to respond. The nimble action required for contemporary conflict resolution and peacebuilding now primarily lies in the hands of local actors and states, sometimes supported by international actors. But it is not always clear who these local actors are or what they need in order to achieve sustainable peace. As part of the roundtable "World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It)," this essay looks in more detail at what we mean by "local" in conflict-affected contexts and asks how local is local enough when resolving conflicts and building peace. It identifies tensions and concerns such as the need for the international community to have a well-defined and easily identified "local agenda" when, in reality, there are often several competing local agendas. The essay presents the Everyday Peace Indicators project as a vehicle that can be used to help communicate these local needs to international actors, and argues for the importance of understanding people's perceived realities in addition to, if not more than, their actual realities when trying to understand peace and conflict trends. In order to do this, we need to more effectively problematize peacebuilding for positive conflict disruption.

In contemporary Argentina, as in much of Latin America, politics is often found in the streets. In recent years it has bypassed traditional political party politics to bring day-to-day needs to the forefront through road blockades and cacerolazos (pot banging). These methods have been particularly successful in Argentina, not only in changing policy but also in bringing down administrations and politicians. They emerged from the 2001 Argentinazo's repertoire of assemblies, demonstrations, riots, looting, and sit-ins as the primary tactics for actors participating in protests in Argentina today. The continuity of resistance in Argentina is a concrete example of Foucault's notions of power and resistance in practice. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

In contemporary Argentina, as in much of Latin America, politics is often found in the streets. In recent years it has bypassed traditional political party politics to bring day-to-day needs to the forefront through road blockades and cacerolazos (pot banging). These methods have been particularly successful in Argentina, not only in changing policy but also in bringing down administrations and politicians. They emerged from the 2001 Argentinazo's repertoire of assemblies, demonstrations, riots, looting, and sit-ins as the primary tactics for actors participating in protests in Argentina today. The continuity of resistance in Argentina is a concrete example of Foucault's notions of power and resistance in practice. En la Argentina contemporánea, como en gran parte de la América Latina, la política muchas veces se encuentra en la calle. En años recientes se ha desviado de la política partidaria tradicional para dar énfasis más bien a las necesidades cotidianas del pueblo por medio de bloqueos a los caminos y cacerolazos. Estos métodos han sido particularmente exitosos en Argentina no solo para cambiar políticas públicas sino también para quitar a políticos y administraciones. Emergieron del repertorio de asambleas, manifestaciones, disturbios, saqueos, y sentadas del Argentinazo de 2001 como las tácticas principales usadas por los actores que participan hoy día en las protestas argentinas. La continuidad de la resistencia en Argentina es un ejemplo concreto de las nociones foucaultianas de la práctica de poder y resistencia.

The provision of social services in protracted conflicts, such as the Colombian conflict, is scarce and sometimes non-existent. Collective reparations are normally composed of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation and guarantees of no repetition. They constitute what normally would encompass development projects and can provide basic social services in contexts of peace and stability with additional symbolic and psychosocial elements. After more than five decades of conflict in Colombia, it seems that significant political will for transitional justice programmes — and in particular, reparations programmes — has emerged with the 2010 election of President Juan Manuel Santos and the ratification of the 2011 Victim's Law. In 2007, a pilot project of collective reparations programmes was initiated with the support of international development agencies. This paper uses data collected from these pilot projects to demonstrate the complexity of introducing development projects as a form of reparations in conflict-affected communities. It also questions whether it is good policy to require communities to have to 'bleed first' to receive basic social services under the auspices of collective reparations and explores the possible problems involved in implementing collective reparations programmes without a comprehensive development policy in post-conflict contexts.

This article presents an original dataset collected in predominantly rural, Eastern Afghanistan, which finds that girls' access to education and women's professional and economic opportunities are key to understanding the experience of peace. In other words, many Afghan men and women in the areas studied not only want to see girls go to school and women sell goods at the market or treat patients in the hospital, but believe this to be fundamental to their understanding of peace in their communities. We seek to investigate this relationship, arguing that much of the donor-assisted programming in Afghanistan is based on a flawed and fragmentary understanding of gendered power relations and priorities, to the detriment of the goals of both peace and women's rights.

Based on findings from the Everyday Peace Indicators project, the article considers how top-down and bottom-up narratives and understandings of conflict often differ. The article posits that top-down narratives are often the result of a peculiar framing system that imposes imaginaries on conflicts and those experiencing them. The bottom-up narratives, based on research in South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe, show that localised perceptions of peace, safety and security are not only articulated in different ways to top-down narratives but also raise different issues.