Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected societies

  • Article: Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected societies (Security Dialogue, 2014) by Roger Mac Ginty. This seminal work provides a comprehensive conceptual scoping of everyday peace, primarily emphasizing bottom-up peacebuilding efforts and the survival strategies employed by individuals and communities in deeply divided societies.

  • Key aims: The article aims to rigorously situate the concept of everyday peace within the broader academic discourse of peace and conflict studies; to construct a practical typology of the nuanced social practices that collectively constitute everyday peace; to critically discuss the inherent limitations of this concept; and to argue compellingly that everyday peace can make significant, often overlooked, contributions to peace formation, particularly in contexts where formal, top-down peacebuilding initiatives are weak, absent, or have failed. It also introduces an enhanced form, termed 'everyday diplomacy,' which holds substantial potential for more transformative conflict resolution.

  • Central claim: Mac Ginty's core argument asserts that everyday peace functions as a meaningful and resilient building block in conflict-affected contexts, serving as a crucial counterbalance to the often rigid, top-down, and technocratic approaches that typically dominate formal peacebuilding endeavors.

  • Core terms: The study revolves around key analytical concepts such as agency (the capacity of individuals to act independently and make their own free choices), bottom-up (approaches originating from local communities rather than central authorities), local (pertaining to specific geographical areas and their inhabitants), peace (the absence of conflict and the presence of social harmony), security (the state of being free from danger or threat), and the everyday (the routine aspects of daily life).

  • Anecdote (Introduction): The article opens with a vivid personal memory from a 1970s Northern Ireland swimming pool. This anecdote powerfully illustrates the implicit rules and social codes governing everyday life in a deeply divided society, prompting profound questions about the origins and maintenance of these rules, the actors involved in their enforcement, and their wider sociological significance in shaping intergroup relations.

  • Conceptual focus: The research primarily focuses on understanding everyday intergroup contact and the cultivation of civility within deeply divided societies. Its ambition is to systematically move beyond conventional top-down analyses, instead foregrounding the intricate social practices that ordinary people and communities utilize to navigate their daily lives amidst profound ethnic or religious cleavages, as well as both episodic (direct) and structural (indirect) forms of violence.

  • Methodology: The study employs a rigorous conceptual scoping methodology, drawing extensively on theoretical insights and empirical findings from diverse academic disciplines, including international relations (IR), sociology, social psychology, and anthropology. It specifically engages with sociological and human-focused approaches to peace and conflict (e.g., Brewer 2010) and incorporates vernacular or ground-level perspectives prevalent in IR scholarship (e.g., Lister & Jarvis, 2013), emphasizing lived experience over grand theory.

  • Definitions introduced:

    • Everyday peace: Defined as the routinized, often unconscious, practices developed and employed by individuals and collectives to navigate daily life in deeply divided societies. These practices encompass both coping mechanisms designed for survival and the latent potential for actively challenging the fixity and permanence of conflict.

    • Deeply divided society: Characterized by profound and pervasive cleavages that extend far beyond the realm of political institutions and party politics. These divisions manifest tangibly in areas such as residential patterns, media consumption, language use, and equitable access to public goods and services. Such societies may experience direct (e.g., violence, threats) or indirect (e.g., discrimination, structural inequality) forms of violence.

  • Positioning: The article positions bottom-up everyday peace in direct contrast to top-down, standardized, and often technocratic peacebuilding models, which are frequently driven by external actors and global templates. It acknowledges the recent

Positioning: The article positions bottom-up everyday peace in direct contrast to top-down, standardized, and often technocratic peacebuilding models, which are frequently driven by external actors and global templates. It acknowledges the recent scholarly turn towards more locally sensitive and participatory approaches, yet it still highlights the persistent dominance and limitations of external interventionist models who may fail to grasp the nuanced social dynamics at play within conflict zones.

Limitations of Everyday Peace

While advocating for its importance, Mac Ginty critically discusses the inherent limitations of everyday peace. These include its potential for fragility and unsustainability, as everyday practices can be disrupted by escalating violence or shifts in power dynamics. Furthermore, everyday peace, by its nature, can be apolitical or depoliticized, meaning it might not actively challenge the underlying structural drivers of conflict or lead to transformative political change. It can sometimes reinforce existing social hierarchies or accommodate rather than confront injustice, becoming a form of 'co-existence' rather than genuine reconciliation or structural transformation. The fragmented and localized nature of everyday peace also makes it difficult to scale up or effectively integrate into broader, top-down peace processes without losing its localized essence.

Contributions to Peace Formation

Despite its limitations, everyday peace makes significant and often overlooked contributions to peace formation. It provides crucial spaces for interaction and civility that can prevent the complete breakdown of social relations even in protracted conflicts. These daily practices of survival and negotiation help to build social capital and trust at the micro-level, which are essential foundations for any future, more formal peacebuilding efforts. By demonstrating the agency of local populations in navigating conflict, everyday peace also offers an important counter-narrative to victimhood or helplessness, highlighting resilience and the capacity for self-organization. It can foster a sense of 'normalcy' that, while not resolving conflict, creates conditions conducive to daily life and potential future dialogue.

Everyday Diplomacy

Mac Ginty introduces an enhanced concept termed 'everyday diplomacy' as a more transformative evolution of everyday peace. While everyday peace often involves informal, routinized coping mechanisms, everyday diplomacy implies more conscious, deliberate, and sustained efforts by individuals and local groups to bridge divides, negotiate differences, and actively build peace. This form of localized diplomacy might involve specific initiatives like intergroup dialogues, joint community projects, or informal mediation, moving beyond mere co-existence towards proactive engagement and problem-solving. Everyday diplomacy holds substantial potential for more transformative conflict resolution because it harnesses local knowledge and agency in a purposive manner, creating pathways for deeper reconciliation and structural change from the ground up where formal initiatives have fallen short.

Conclusion

Mac Ginty's work serves as a powerful call to re-evaluate the foundations of peacebuilding, urging scholars and practitioners to pay closer attention to the micro-level processes and local agency that underpin societal resilience in conflict zones. By conceptualizing and detailing everyday peace and everyday diplomacy, the article challenges the dominant state-centric and top-down paradigms, suggesting that sustainable peace is inextricably linked to the daily lives, routines, and conscious choices of ordinary people navigating extraordinary circumstances.

Roger Mac Ginty's article, "Everyday peace: Bottom-up and local agency in conflict-affected societies," introduces the concept of everyday peace as routinized, often unconscious practices individuals and communities employ to navigate daily life in deeply divided societies. This bottom-up approach to peacebuilding, emphasizing local agency, acts as a crucial counterbalance to rigid, top-down, and technocratic formal peacebuilding efforts. The research focuses on intergroup contact and civility amidst ethnic/religious cleavages and various forms of violence, arguing for the significant, often overlooked, contributions of these micro-level practices to peace formation. While acknowledging limitations such as fragility, potential for depoliticization, and difficulty in scaling, Mac Ginty also introduces everyday diplomacy as a more conscious and deliberate evolution, holding greater potential for transformative conflict resolution. The work ultimately urges a re-evaluation of peacebuilding, highlighting the indispensable role of daily lives, routines, and conscious choices of ordinary people in achieving sustainable peace.