The introductory essay presents a locally-grounded theoretical framework for studying youth and everyday peace(building). Drawing on examples from fieldwork as well as insights from the articles to follow in the journal, the essay highlights three interrelated and overlapping spheres of inquiry. First, it makes the case for examining the age-specific as well as gender-, and other contextually-specific roles of youth as they relate to everyday peacebuilding. Second, the essay draws attention to how everyday peace is narrated by or through youth. It poses questions about what values, policies, and governmental structures are specifically being resisted and rejected, and how peace is conceptualised and/or hidden in the narratives of youth. Third, along with these concerns, the nexus of global and local (including discursive and institutional) structures that facilitate, curtail, and curtain everyday peace (building) practices are important to identify and evaluate for their impacts on the roles and ideas of youth. In proposing this theoretical framework that recognises the complex and multiple ways youth are engaged in their everyday worlds, this essay asks how we can engage this recognition within knowledges and practices of everyday peace(building).

Orthodox notions of peace built on liberal institutionalism have been critiqued for their lack of attention to the local and the people who populate these structures. The concept of an 'everyday peace' seeks to take into account the agency and activity of those frequently marginalised or excluded and use these experiences as the basis for a more responsive way of understanding peace. Further, reconceptualising and complicating a notion of 'everyday peace' as embodied recognises marginalised people as competent commentators and observers of their world, and capable of engaging with the practices, routines and radical events that shape their everyday resistances and peacebuilding.Peace, in this imagining, is not abstract, but built through everyday practices amidst violence.Young people, in particular, are often marginalised or rendered passive in discussions of the violences that affect them. In recognising this limited engagement, this paper responds through drawing on fieldwork conducted with conflict-affected young people in a peri-urban barrio community near Colombia's capital Bogota to forward a notion of an embodied everyday peace. This involves exploring the presence and voices of young people as stakeholders in a negotiation of what it means to build peace within daily experience in the context of local and broader violence and marginalisation. By centring young people's understandings of and contributions within the everyday, this paper responds to the inadequacies of liberal peacebuilding narratives, and forwards a more complex rendering of everyday peace as embodied.

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Violence and insecurity are often read as totalising narratives of communities in parts of Latin America, flattening the complexity of everyday life and the responses of occupants who suffer from fear. In this article we draw on ethnographic research undertaken in los Altos de Cazucá in Colombia and in San Luis Potosí in Mexico. While both sites are distinct locations with different historic, economic, social and political contexts they share features of communities affected by violence and insecurity: distrust of institutions of the state; rationalisations for managing violence in daily life; and narratives of fear that appear woven through the fabric of conversations. However, fear and violence are not all-encompassing experiences and individuals in both these communities describe practices of navigation of violence that draw on positive communal experiences. This article explores how, in these communities where violence comes to be expected but never normalised, people navigate their everyday lives. KeywordsViolence; social navigation; Colombia; Mexico; insecurity; everyday life. Please cite this article as: