Failed Statebuilding by Oliver Richmond

Author:Oliver Richmond
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300175318
Publisher: Yale University Press

Examples of Peace Formation

Peace formation is varied, mainly emerging from bottom-up networks. Some are related to history, culture and identity. Many post-conflict civil societies are often described as weak, dependent upon fickle donor priorities and funds, and driven by their policies, as has been argued in the cases of Namibia and Mozambique recently.39 As in many other locations, international characterisations of local peace dynamics are infantilising. But local organisations often continue to engage in human rights, development, education or training work, often within a subsistence context (meaning that they do not receive donor or international support).40 Sometimes, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they operate in a private social and cultural-political register of tactical resistance to state failure or international conditionality, rather than in formal political and public spaces.41 When such organisations decide to work in this manner, even without significant donor support they find that they are able to survive and develop their own approaches because of the hidden reach of their local networks. Furthermore, this illustrates the crucial importance of including a wider range of issues, associations and networks than the narrow one envisaged by donors’ understandings of civil society. For example, in Mozambique, one NGO is using traditional musical instruments to teach people about pluralism, peace and coexistence. Another organisation, initiated by a religious network, has developed a small arms decommissioning project, which has earned worldwide fame.42 In Bosnia-Herzegovena cultural organisations have created a space for debate about the state as well as for critiques of local politics and international strategies.43 Similarly, in the case of Guatemala, the majority community of Mayan people has developed numerous ways of preserving its culture and identity, and has increasingly become more successful in finding spaces in which it can survive and coexist with the modern state. It has presented its culture and cosmology in national and international fora,44 in an encounter between very different cosmologies (local ‘indigenous’ versus European rational-legal).

Formal conflict-resolution workshops also form a site for peace formation. In the 1990s, workshops run in Cyprus by mainly American or European scholars provided an important platform for social reconciliation to develop. Yet locally they were often perceived to be patronising, and indicated a lack of international awareness and sensitivity about the conflict. Only a small group of people became involved. In these meetings, people interested in peace could meet across the green line that had divided Greek and Turkish Cypriots since 1974 or even earlier. They valued the contact with their ‘enemies’ and the ability to debate, but they also felt that the workshops, in their efforts to find a mutual accommodation, sometimes glossed over the difficult political and justice issues they faced.45 On the other hand, the academics who ran them were often frustrated by what they saw as local partners’ tendencies not to engage in the way they wanted, and yet to appear to be dependent on them for any contact with the other side.

Despite these difficulties, local participants were able to use these processes to build a peace constituency that did not necessarily lead to agreement but had the potential to help peaceful coexistence to emerge.

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