In Local Ownership of Peacebuilding in Afghanistan: Shouldering Responsibility for Sustainable Peace and Development, Chuck Thiessen addresses the struggle of the Western-led mission in Afghanistan to ensure the formation of a locally experienced sustainable peace. Thiessen reports on current developments in peacebuilding theory and provides conversations with numerous peacebuilding leaders in Afghanistan about revising peacebuilding paradigms and strategies so that local, Afghan ownership becomes a central concern.
This book explores the meaning of local ownership in peacebuilding and examines the ways in which it has been, and could be, operationalized in post-conflict environments. In the context of post-conflict peacebuilding, the idea of local ownership is based upon the premise that no peace process is sustainable in the absence of a meaningful degree of local involvement. Despite growing recognition of the importance of local ownership, however, relatively little attention has been paid to specifying what precisely the concept means or how it might be implemented. This volume contributes to the ongoing debate on the future of liberal peacebuilding through a critical investigation of the notion of local ownership, and challenges conventional assumptions about who the relevant locals are and what they are expected to own. Drawing on case studies from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, the text argues that local ownership can only be fostered through a long-term consensus-building process, which involves all levels of the conflict-affected society. This book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, development studies, security studies and IR.
The international community has followed up its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan with a complex, multi-faceted peacebuilding project. However, informed observers believe that this Western-led mission in Afghanistan has failed to address the inherent peacebuilding needs of Afghanistan and has hindered the formation of a locally experienced sustainable peace. In response, emerging peacebuilding theories and rhetoric have pointed to an urgent need for revised peacebuilding paradigms and strategies that hold local, Afghan ownership of peacebuilding activities as a central concern. This book responds to this need for revised peacebuilding paradigms and: (1) introduces the topic of local ownership of peacebuilding in Afghanistan; (2) surveys current shifts in peacebuilding theory and practice that are only starting to be realized on the ground; (3) sets the context for a discussion of local ownership of peacebuilding; (4) reports on the perceptions of foreign and Afghan peacebuilding leaders working in Afghanistan in regards to the journey towards local ownership of peacebuilding; and (5) suggests the creation of a locally designed and led conflict transformation system that might help restructure local-foreign relations and advance the journey towards Afghan ownership of peacebuilding.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume examines the policies and practices of rising powers on peacebuilding. It analyzes how and why their approaches differ from those of traditional donors and multilateral institutions. The policies of the rising powers towards peacebuilding may significantly influence how the UN and others undertake peacebuilding in the future. This book is an invaluable resource for practitioners, policy makers, researchers and students who want to understand how peacebuilding is likely to evolve over the next decades.
International Peacebuilding offers a concise, practical and accessible introduction to the growing field of peacebuilding for students and practitioners. This new textbook comprises three parts, each dealing with a key aspect of peacebuilding: Part I defines the core concepts and theoretical discussions that provide the philosophical grounds for contemporary peacebuilding activities. Part II divides the procedures of peacebuilding into three phases and examines some of the important features of each phase. Part III examines the key areas of the practice of peacebuilding. The volume approaches peacebuilding from the viewpoints of individual actors or institutions, introducing a range of theoretical discussions with which students can critically examine contemporary peacebuilding practice, as well as presenting detailed case studies for key issues highlighted in the text. In doing so, the book aims to provide more concrete ideas on how peacebuilding programmes are planned and implemented in the field and which major issues should be addressed by peacebuilding practitioners. This book will be essential reading for all students of peacebuilding, conflict transformation and post-conflict reconstruction, and recommended reading for students of international organisations, international security and IR in general.
Contemporary practices of international peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction are often unsatisfactory. There is now a growing awareness of the significance of local governments and local communitites as an intergrated part of peacebuilding in order to improve quality and enhance precision of interventions. In spite of this, ‘the local’ is rarely a key factor in peacebuilding, hence ‘everyday peace’ is hardly achieved. The aim of this volume is threefold: firstly it illuminates the substantial reasons for working with a more localised approach in politically volatile contexts. Secondly it consolidates a growing debate on the significance of the local in these contexts. Thirdly, it problematizes the often too swiftly used concept, ‘the local’, and critically discuss to what extent it is at all feasible to integrate this into macro-oriented and securitized contexts. This is a unique volume, tackling the ‘local turn’ of peacebuilding in a comprehensive and critical way. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
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.
Introduces the Everyday Peace Indicators as a measurement, diagnostic and evaluation tool and makes an argument for its utility in conflict affected contexts.
This book presents a critical analysis of the liberal peace project and offers possible alternatives and models. In the past decade, the model used for reconstructing societies after conflicts has been based on liberal assumptions about the pacifiying effects of 'open markets' and 'open societies'. Yet, despite the vast resources invested in helping establish the precepts of this liberal peace, outcomes have left much to be desired. The book argues that failures in the liberal peace project are not only due to efficiency problems related to its adaptation in adverse local environments, but mostly due to problems of legitimacy of turning an ideal into a doctrine for action. The aim of the book is to scrutinize assumptions about the value of democratization and marketization and realities on the ground by combining theoretical discussions with empirical evidence from key post-conflict settings such as Iraq and Afghanistan. These show the disparities that exist between the ideals and the reality of the liberal peace project, as seen by external peacebuilders and domestic actors. The book then proposes various alternatives and modifications to better accommodate local perspectives, values and agency in attempts to forge a new consensus. This book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding/peacekeeping, statebuilding, war and conflict studies, international security and IR.
