Visions of Peace of Professional Peace Workers

Peace beyond the Absence of War: Three Trends in the Study of Positive Peace

“…Early attempts in this direction simply added a measure of democracy to distinguish more "participatory" peace from negative peace (e.g., [17,[30][31][32]). Although this does make it possible to distinguish peace in Sweden from that in North Korea, the stream of critiques on what is called "liberal peace" by its critics (for example [33][34][35][36][37][38], see also [11] chapter 2) shows serious challenges with this simple equation of positive peace with some semblance of democracy. In a nutshell, critics argue that state capacity might be more important than democracy for prolonged peace [33], that the notion of democracy (or at least the models implemented in postwar peacebuilding) forces Western concepts and institutions onto non-Western states [36,37,39], and that democracy-promotion makes liberal peacebuilding focus too much on national-level politics at the expense of local factors relevant for peace [37,38,40].…”

“…The second risk is that indicators drive the underlying concept of peace away from something that can be meaningfully labeled "positive peace" and to the direction of human rights observance, economic development, or economic risk management. For instance, Regan's concept of peace as a situation in which "no actor or group of actors has a unilateral incentive to attempt change by force of arms' ( [42], p. 186) can still be seen as a positive concept of peace, but his indicators (bond prices and black-market currency exchange rates) push peace into the economic domain, where many actors actually working for peace would not think it belongs (see [11,48]). Of course, it can be argued that the proposed indicators should explicitly be seen as proxy indicators, but that begs the question of whether these proxies correctly mirror the level of positive peace in a society or are merely selected because of the availability of databases.…”

“…Doing so could establish a dialog between local and external peacebuilders that would allow both sides to see some new perspectives, rather than maintaining the divide between warzones and what Severine Autesserre has called "peaceland" [65] or the fiction of a unified liberal peace consensus [34,66]. The works of Van Iterson Scholten [11] who interviewed professional peace workers rather than victims of conflict and Caplan [26] who studied the meanings that different international organizations attach to peace are promising points of entry for such a dialog.…”

“…Building an "absence" of anything seems a priori absurd. Having a more fine-grained concept of peace might lead to a more realistic assessment of what international peacebuilding can and has achieved and thus a better assessment of whether peacebuilding is "in crisis" or merely building a different kind of peace, or different peaces (in the plural, see [11]) than its critics are looking for.…”

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

“…As critiques to the notions of liberal peace that have been dominant in contemporary peacebuilding processes, these studies have generated debates on various concepts like hybrid peace, agonistic peace, and everyday peace (Jarstad et al, 2020). In particular, the concept of everyday peace was introduced to acknowledge and examine “a peace at a different level,” where ordinary people develop and experience peace (van Iterson Sholten, 2020). Although they may look “banal, mundane, and unimportant” and are often “unrelated to formal peacebuilding initiatives,” everyday forms of peacebuilding, it is argued, can promote more emancipatory and bottom-up processes that more accurately reflect local actors’ perspectives and interests (Autesserre, 2017, p. 124; Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2013; Richmond, 2011).…”