Preserving the everyday: Pre-political agency in peacebuilding theory

Abstract

Quite a lot of recent peacebuilding scholarship has deployed the concept of ‘the everyday’. In an extension of the local turn’s emphasis on agency and resistance, much of this scholarship interprets the everyday as inherently a site of politics. It does so either by interpreting every act (no matter how motivated) as an agentic political act, or by equating agentic political acts (at the local level) with the quotidian activities which define the everyday. This article argues, however, that representing the everyday in this way interprets both forms of activity in ways which have critical implications for peacebuilding theory, because both moves inadvertently strip everyday acts of the emergent creativity and innovation inherent to ‘everyday-ness’. Alternative understandings of and engagement with different forms of agency would encourage peace scholars to acknowledge the overtly political nature of peace projects and so to reserve ‘the everyday’ label for pre-political forms of action which may contribute to peace, but in a more unintentional, organic or emergent fashion. This is not to argue that everyday acts are a-political or non-political, but only that they do not have political motivations and are not themselves products of conscious will to power, or even to peace itself.

Understanding Everyday Peace in Cambodia: Plurality, Subtlety, and Connectivity

“…These findings call for revisiting the trend in some recent studies on everyday peace that tends to narrowly understand everyday peace as the actions based on political motivation and to interpret everyday peacebuilding as political acts (Åhäll, 2019; Berents & McEvoy-Levy, 2015; Tellidis & Glomm, 2019; Väyrynen, 2019). While the contribution of these studies should be fully appreciated, too much focus on these areas of everyday peacebuilding may mean that the academic discussion undervalues the significance of the fluid and organic practices as important sources of peacebuilding from the academic examination (Millar, 2020).…”

“…Indeed, many everyday peacebuilding activities are politically motivated and, more importantly, should have political effects regardless of the motivations. Nevertheless, if researchers assume that “the everyday must always be considered a site of politics,” such a framework risks devaluing the prepolitical realm of everyday peace and misjudges the reality in the communities (Millar, 2020, p. 317).…”

“…Against this backdrop, this article examines how everyday peace is manifested and experienced in local communities in Cambodia, thereby contributing to specify and explore the nature of everyday peace: What does everyday peace look like, and what are the features that characterise it? Moreover, the exploration of everyday peace in this article does not assume peace is produced through explicitly or consciously political practices and can therefore capture how everyday peace is manifested in mundane aspects of everyday life that are not commonly seen as related to peacebuilding (Das, 2007; Millar, 2020; Ochen, 2014; Visoka, 2019).…”

“…Moreover, everyday peace in the critical scholarship tends to be understood as political actions based on normative emancipatory perspectives. Due to this tendency, unintentional, organic, emergent, or prepolitical, everyday peace practices remain understudied despite their significance for how peace is manifested (Millar, 2020).…”

Everyday peacebuilding and practices in Kenya, South Sudan, Somaliland and Ghana: introduction

“…As Dery et al (2022) demonstrate and rightly argue in this issue, as researchers, we also need to pay attention to contexts where peace prevails. We therefore use the term 'everyday' as Millar (2020) describes it, as placeholder for 'the local'; more as a referent to a scale of analysis than a substantive characteristic of distinct phenomena in its own right.…”