Quality/control: international peace interventions and ‘the everyday’

Abstract

Current discourses about the everyday in relation to international peace interventions focus on two main aspects. First, the perceived quality or qualities of everyday life tend to be attributed to 'local' organisations or actors and assessed positively. Second, the control of life (including bio-political control and governance) tends to be associated with 'international' actors and viewed negatively. This article challenges these key assumptions by contextualising them in social and political theories of the everyday and in two key examples: 'affective' peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and 'threatworks' in Northern Ireland. It also calls for an approach to the 'everyday' in international interventions which moves beyond local/international power dynamics and is attentive to the pluralities of power and practice that emerge in these settings.

Everyday Resistance, Peacebuilding and State-making : Insights from 'Africa's World War'

“…These become visible when examined from the everyday practices of the actors involved. In IR the everyday has become synonymous with the makings of actual subjects in their most quotidian roles (Autesserre 2014;Hobson and Seabrooke 2007;Mitchell 2011b;Neumann 2002). This is not so much a new field of study, as it represents a common call throughout the social sciences, and especially from critical theorists, to connect the micro-dynamics of daily life with macro structures and processes, even as a way of embodying them (Bleiker 2000;Davies and Niemann 2009;Enloe 1989;Marchand 2000;Tickner 2005;Wilcox 2015).…”

“…12 Das (2007: 78) argues that violence is part of everyday life experience and that this daily experience has surpassed a narrow framework of power and resistance. This is the framework adopted by Mitchell (2011aMitchell ( , 2011b So the task of international actors was to operationalise the state towards making 'the police, police, the judiciary, judge … get the software … the public servants, pay them!' The image of the DRC as a failed state looms large over policy-making, but also over academic research.…”

Mapping the Nexus of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding

“…One analytic for understanding hybridity in peacebuilding and for conceptualizing a socalled post-liberal peace, the focus on 'the everyday' as a means of making local agency visible and meaningful (Richmond 2009a(Richmond , 2009bMitchell 2011;, has opened another seam of research that parallels, and shares the normative assumptions of, critical transitional justice studies that emphasize the bottom-up. Extending this agenda into the everyday practices of peacebuilding itself through ethnographic research has enabled peacebuilding researchers to highlight the micropolitics of power, space and knowledge that are constitutive, in this perspective, of how interventions operate and how peace might (not) be built (Pouligny 2006;Higate and Henry 2009;Autesserre 2014;Baker 2014).…”

War and Peace in Côte d'Ivoire: Violence, Agency, and the Local/International Line

“…She argues that it is also more complex than resistance or collaboration from below. 8 If 'local' agency is integrated into analyses of international peace interventions, it cannot be as agents who only suffer or react to such interventions. As Mitchell writes, in the literature on peace and conflict studies the everyday is discussed by 'attributing the "quality" dimension to "local" actors and the "control" aspect to "international" actors', thus reifying the power relations between the two.…”