Everyday Peace
Book review: Everyday Peace: How So-called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict (OUP, 2021). By Roger Mac Ginty.
I once wrote in a poem that ‘every violence is intimate’. I was taken to task at the time by a fellow poet who’d been a bomb loader in the RAF as a teenager during the Second World War. But I still think I was right.
I was reminded of this when reading Roger Mac Ginty’s new book, Everyday Peace: How So-called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict (OUP, 2021). Because in making a case for what he calls Everyday Peace, Mac Ginty seems to be saying that much of what constitutes and enables peace in a given context is the collection of many, many small-scale ‘hyperlocal’ acts of intentional omission and commission done by people as they go about their day. Intimate peace, perhaps.
To be clear, he is not saying that all peace is local, simply that in understanding peace, we need to consider the everyday as well as looking on a wider scope and scale at grander, more obviously political actions: peace processes, political deals, government policies, international negotiations, and the like.
Everyday peace, he points out, includes acts of tolerance and kindness between neighbours – perhaps neighbours from ‘opposing’ communities. It includes routine actions such as greeting neighbours civilly or shopping in the same market; one-off actions such as helping out a person or a family in trouble; and rarer actions that require us to stand up against societal norms, even when these are brutally enforced, such as when young Germans stood up against the Nazis, or Sudanese soldiers more recently acted to protect, rather than fire upon civilian demonstrators in Khartoum. The book reminds us that when asked what constitutes peace for them, people across the world almost always include commonplace issues such as the freedom to hang out with others, send their children to school, conduct business affairs safely, and so on.
The book draws on many years of research, and also on Mac Ginty’s personal experience of growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. He brings both an academic and a very human approach to the work.
The book is a helpful reminder that while formal, political peace processes and peacebuilding remain essential, so as to create the space in which Everyday Peace can flourish, they will also fail in the absence of Everyday Peace. Both are therefore part of the rich ecology of peace and peacefulness.
The continuum of Everyday Peace
Mac Ginty introduces a simple continuum of Everyday Peace, characterised by three overlapping categories of norms and behaviour:
Sociality <-> Reciprocity <-> Solidarity
… with Solidarity representing the strongest and most effective form of Everyday Peace, and Sociality being weaker but still better than no peace at all.
An example of Sociality might be when a business woman purposefully employs members of another ethnic group, driven perhaps by a sense of empathy and an appreciation of the need to use her influence to help build bridges for the greater good. Reciprocity, as the name implies, includes when people from antagonistic communities reach out in collaboration because they understand they ‘need each other’. And Solidarity is when the ‘circuits’ of people from different groups are genuinely entangled in a way that supports a sense of common identity. The book provides real examples of these three types of Everyday Peace from various contexts.
Circuits, power, families and courage
Everyday Peace as a concept highlights the importance of overlapping, entangled, ‘circuits’ that contribute to our sense of identity and motivation, driving and enabling our choices and actions. Each of us is part of several different circuits, for example a state security operative may also be a church member and part of a peer group that attended university together, and is subject to the different motivations and norms, and can avail himself of the different opportunities each circuit entails.
The concept also rightly emphasises the importance of power or agency in permitting and enabling individuals to behave in the way they do. It’s welcome that in considering the scalability of Everyday Peace, the book acknowledges the importance of the family – i.e. almost the smallest scale – in fomenting values and behaviour; and acknowledges too that the family is a unit of society in which, if it is itself ‘everyday peaceful’, thus contributes as a peaceful component, to a peaceful society more widely.
It’s also welcome that Mac Ginty highlights the importance of courage, bravery and leadership to peace, as this is often forgotten. For example, in a context where two communities live side by side but with a history of unresolved enmity – an all-too-common scenario – it can require a great deal of courage to reach out across the inter-community divide. If doing so goes against community norms, this can lead to ostracization or worse by members of one’s own in-group. And of course the Sudanese soldiers mentioned earlier may well have put themselves at risk of their own lives, by protecting the protestors.
In praise of negative peace
The book is also welcome in its acknowledgement of the importance of negative peace. Negative peace – put simply, when armed violence has stopped, but its causes remain unresolved – has a bad press in peacebuilding circles. Quite rightly, peacebuilders decry negative peace as unsustainable, citing the risk of a return to violence because of unresolved grievances. But sometimes a form of negative peace is as much as can be achieved for now: or in better circumstances, it provides a platform of short-term stability that can be built upon and converted to ‘positive peace’ – i.e. the capacity to anticipate, manage and resolve tensions and conflicts without resort to violence, and promote fairness.
Mac Ginty provides examples of the small things people do in conflict-prone societies to avoid the tripwires they see around them: to avoid exacerbating tensions or triggering incidents. In one of his Northern Ireland examples, he cites his own attempt to minimise potential problems with people from ‘the other’ community in Northern Ireland by making sure his hire car radio is not tuned to ‘the wrong station’ when he returns it to the airport. That he feels the need to do so is an indication of the negative peace that still persists there. But that he does so as an act of Everyday Peace is an example of how individuals learn how to behave in ways that maintain stability and avoid inflaming tensions, as part of their everyday.
Language
Mac Ginty takes great care over his choice of words, recognising their importance in creating or perpetuating the lens through which we regard any given context. This matters, and his choice of metaphors is careful and helpful. He talks about ‘scaling out’, rather than just ‘scaling up’ – acknowledging that everyday peace acts may transfer more effectively on the horizontal, than the vertical plane. And he borrows Jean Paul Lederach’s idea of ‘critical yeast’, to replace ‘critical mass’, as a way to describe the organic processes through which Everyday Peace ideas and behaviours can trabsfer, grow and evolve within and between communities and societies.
I would however take issue with way he describes the difference between local and other dimensions: frequently characterising them in terms of levels. This is a common problem in peace (and other) studies. It’s true that one can helpfully differentiate between ‘levels’ of government and administration: from national/state downwards to county, to municipality, for example. This ‘vertical’ trope can be helpful in analysing power and subsidiarity. But it seems to me that to talk of everyday peace actions as happening at a ‘local level’ is to undermine his core idea somewhat, and could perhaps lead to wrong-headed policy responses (since ‘the essential character of metaphor is prophetic‘ as Denis Donoghue has written). Surely it is a more three-dimensional issue of scope and scale, than of level?
But that’s a small criticism. Mac Ginty ends by asking four questions of his own analysis. Is Everyday Peace really peace, or is it just tolerance and an unsustainable status quo? How significant is it, in the scheme of things? Given its small scale, by definition, and often somewhat hidden nature, how can researchers or peace promoters see, measure or harness it? And finally, to what extent does it connect up and out to, and nourish, other peace dynamics on a larger scale?
Rightly I think, he finds that Everyday Peace does matter – even if in some cases it is ‘merely tolerance’ – as it provides the basis for non-violent co-existence and creates the potential for more. He recommends that researchers – and, I would add, policy makers and peacebuilders – train their eyes and ears so they are better attuned to the subtleties of Everyday Peace. (Though they also need to take care not to mess with peace capacities they understand poorly, and potentially undermine them through ignorance.) And he makes a good case that Everyday Peace is indeed part of the interconnected ecology that enables peaceful co-existence, at least partly through the interaction of the complex ‘circuitry’ that helps describe and explain relationships and people’s motivation.
I recommend this book. It’s easy to read, even for this non-academic reader. It flows well and although it presents a somewhat original concept, it does so with relative humility. Despite suggesting plausibly that Everyday Peace is the ‘first and last’ peace (representing the first peaceful acts as violence diminishes, and the last peaceful acts as violence takes hold), this is stated quietly: he doesn’t call it the Alpha and Omega of peace!
Perhaps, returning to poetry where I began, Mac Ginty is a fan of Keats’s idea of Negative Capability: that we don’t need to claim or even aim for certainty, and that exploring an important idea is already a good step made.
The King’s Peace
My poem, The King’s Peace, was kindly included by the editors in Flights of the Dragonfly’s FLIGHTS e-Journal Issue 4 earlier this year. It’s one of a series of poems I’m developing about peace and conflict in respect of specific geographic locations and moments in history.
The King’s Peace
To keep his peace, our king built temples,
courts and palaces, and scarred
the land he’d won, with ditches, ports
and roads; determined how we die;
and blessed us with his enmities.
To teach us irony, he named
his cousins lords and justices.
Apprised of God’s mistake by priests
and clerks, on pain of punishment
he made us speak a single tongue.
His word was written, maps were drawn.
But laws and maps and roadways lengthened
distances, and when he sailed,
he left no instrument through which
to see, but a kaleidoscope.
We turn and turn its wheels but cannot
make the fractured picture whole.
My Poems on the Radio!
Happy to share an interview from Wildhart Radio where I’m interviewed by Sian Thomas who also kindly let me read a few poems from Watching the Moon Landing and Poetry After Auschwitz. You can listen here: WILDHART RADIO.
Watching the Moon Landing: my new poetry collection
I’m very happy to be able to say that my new poetry collection, Watching the Moon Landing, is published today by Hedgehog Poetry Press.
Following my 2020 collection Poetry After Auschwitz, these poems, mainly written in the last decade, cover a variety of themes. COVID-19 is there, but the poems also speak of love and loss, uncertainty, well-being, migration, power, violence, nature, superstition, memory, art and faith. Above all, they seem to explore connections, separation, nearness and distance in time and space, and the fragile frameworks we construct to make sense of and protect the (equally fragile) emotional, social, political and physical landscapes in which we live.
Many of the poems are based on imagined characters trying to comprehend the world they see and imagine – and the blurred lines between seeing and imagining. The title poem describes a person watching the landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, on live TV in 1492 Spain. Or are they watching the first moon landing on TV, in 1969? We aren’t quite sure.
Watching the Moon Landing on TV, in a taverna in Castile We let the fire die, the cheese and bread remain untouched, beside the wine; each heard his own heart beat; no one could look away as the pinaza beached, and Colón stepped ashore and knelt – the first to reach and claim those talked-of lands, with flags on upturned oars. So much to understand: the tapestries of hills, heaped rain clouds, untrod sands, dark here, but daylight there, their bravery and skill… He crossed himself in prayer – God’s truth: for all we knew, that glistening strand he’d dared sail to and land on might as well have been the moon. But knowledge woke that night in us: a wind had changed. We roused the fire. The sight of carabela sails could never be the same. This theme of exploring sometimes slippery connections across both time and space recurs throughout the book. It also provided the inspiration for Lebona Vernon's artwork for the front and back covers, mixing the Apollo space programme with 15th Century European exploration across the Atlantic. Details of where and how to buy the book can be found here. Meanwhile, I'm launching the book online, alongside fellow Hedgehog Poetry Press authors Raine Geoghegan and Nigel Kent on 2 February at 7.30pm: free tickets available here. All comers are very welcome. And the book will also be featured on Home Stage Poetry: Meet the Poet on 9th February.
Operationalising the Triple Nexus
How individual agencies can ensure the Humanitarian, Development and Peacebuilding Nexus (HDPN) is genuinely useful to them and their work.
The relevance of the Triple Nexus to individual agencies
The Triple Nexus was a response to the incoherence, and the paucity and weakness of linkages between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding interventions and agencies. Aid agencies have long failed to work in the joined up away that supporting people in fragile contexts requires, and the Nexus implies they should collaborate more effectively across the boundaries that have long built up between humanitarian, development and peace work. It has been endorsed by institutional donors, including collectively through the OECD-DAC. Most UN and international agencies have integrated at least the language of the Nexus into their programming and communications.
For a typical development, humanitarian or peacebuilding agency, or a multi-purpose agency, its relevance might be seen as fourfold, helping to:
- Improve coherence across its own humanitarian, development and peacebuilding actions, including with and among local partners across the three dimensions of the Nexus.
- Improve coherence and linkages with other agencies, across the three dimensions of the Nexus.
- Inform its advocacy, for example towards donors and other international and national institutions including governments.
- Reassure donors and other stakeholders of its commitment to the Nexus, to help secure their support.
Obstacles to integrating the Nexus
But many agencies have found it hard to operationalise the Nexus. There are three main reasons for this. The first, most often cited reason, is the existence of silos in the aid sector, and within individual organisations. These are the result of long-standing cultural and practical differences in the way the three ‘tribes’, representing the three dimensions of the Nexus, approach their work. Many factors are at play here, including:
- The rapid response and shorter-term solutions, versus slower onset, longer-term approaches that understandably separate humanitarians from peacebuilding and development actors.
- Humanitarians’ concern that embracing ‘political’ considerations may undermine their neutrality and access; whereas for peacebuilders, politics is an essential factor to be understood and addressed; while development actors may sit somewhere between the two.
The second reason is quite simply the difficulty of introducing major change into a complex and fragmented sector which already follows ‘tried and tested’ approaches, and in which accountability is blurred. Levers of change are widely distributed across the sector, hard to locate, and often ineffective.
The third reason is that the Nexus has been defined in a way that is inherently unhelpful. It was coined by people looking at the aid sector as though from above. What they saw was a lack of operational coordination, hence their fix was defined in terms of better operational linkages.
But people in need of support seldom make such clear distinctions between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding. A person fleeing conflict or disaster may express their initial needs in humanitarian terms, but they do not thus relinquish their right or aspiration for peaceful progress. A person can be simultaneously in receipt of support to stay alive, while also improving their prospects for the future, amid improved security, stability and governance: reflecting all three dimensions of the Nexus.
So coining the problem and its solution in terms of inter-agency collaboration, rather than programmatic and ethical coherence, is maladroit. This has fed a widespread sense of cynicism among agencies, where genuine commitment to the Nexus per se is thin – even where staff may already understand the need for, and be using flexible approaches. Local organisations in aid recipient countries can be even more sceptical, seeing the Nexus as yet another distraction from more pressing issues such as their own empowerment and access to aid resources.
So it’s essential that any agency wishing to operationalise the Nexus should start with an honest appraisal of its utility for the agency concerned. This means defining or interpreting the Nexus in a way that fits its own values and organisational realties, and then making a conscious decision to invest in the kinds of approaches that emerge from this analysis. The Nexus is only useful if by adopting it, we can increase the positive impact of our own and / or others’ work. Otherwise it’s a distraction.
An approach to identifying an agency-specific approach to the HDPN
A generic approach to developing an agency’s strategic approach to the HDPN might look something like this. It could be divided into four main stages, probably led by a cross-departmental working group.
1. Identify Niche
Discussions/interviews with the working group, staff and partners (programme and non-programme departments; field and HQ), to identify how the Triple Nexus can be most useful to the organisation. Draft a paper outlining its strategic focus, for example using Moore’s Public Value model, which locates strategy in the overlap (and potential overlap) between Capacity, Mission, and Enabling Environment.
2. Validate Strategic Niche and Develop Plan
After initial vetting by the working group, the draft paper would be used as the basis for an online workshop with two objectives:
- Amend and validate the draft strategic niche
- Outline areas of action for taking the strategy forward across different departments.
Based on the workshop outputs, and subsequent informal internal bilateral and group discussions, the strategy and plan of actions is finalised. This process would involve all staff expected to play a key role in leading its implementation. The plan would contain a mixture of measures, e.g. piloting and measuring progress in specific projects/contexts; awareness raising/capacity building for staff and partners; adaptations in programme design, monitoring and evaluation and learning (DMEL); the development of external messaging; and tailoring approaches to institutional donors. If possible, these should be integrated into existing plans, to avoid overloading budgets and people’s time.
3. Piloting
During implementation, teams should have access to hands on technical assistance and also a helpdesk. The working group keeps finger on the pulse of progress, takes note of and responds to key lessons learned, and keeps the project alive (among all the competing priorities staff are faced with).
4. Lesson Learned, and Phase 2 Plan
At the end of the pilot period – say a year – a workshop is planned to elucidate lessons learned. Its design is influenced by a review of relevant reports, and a number of internal stakeholder interviews. This would be used to write a short, synthesised final report, with lessons learned and recommendations, and develop a phase 2 plan.
Review of ‘Poetry after Auschwitz’ by Phil Vernon
A thoughtful review of my collection Poetry After Auschwitz by a fellow poet with a keen eye and ear for underlying themes, Nigel Kent
I remember reading Phil Vernon’s micro-collection, entitled This Quieter Shore, back in 2018 and thinking what a talented writer he is. Therefore, I looked forward to delving into Poetry after Auschwitz (SPM Publications, 2020) when it arrived and wow, what a collection it is!
Vernon’s principal concern in Poetry after Auschwitz is the way history affects us. He gives a voice to historical figures (such as Judas, Stalin’s daughter, and a liberator of Belsen) to articulate the transformative effect of past events upon the present: he portrays their influence as a constant presence in our lives. In El Tres de Mayo he writes: ‘What’s past is present: faded cryptogram of sound – no matter we try to prise/ a meaning out of or ignore it – fills/ our ears with its abiding , quiet refrain.’ How the past affects the present is complex: the effects differ but are always significant…
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Poetry Reading with Peter A.
I very much enjoyed reading a few poems on Home Stage Poetry‘s Meet The Poet last night. Not the least, because of the intelligent conversation with host Florrie Crass and fellow poet Peter A.
And especially, because it was moving to hear Peter read from his recent book of poems, Art of Insomnia, which I certainly recommend.
I read mainly from my collection Poetry After Auschwitz (still available for a mere £7 on Amazon and elsewhere!)
In case of interest, the one-hour broadcast can still be watched on You Tube here.
The Frontlines of Peace, by Séverine Autessere. A practical, incremental vision for peacebuilding.
Book review. The Frontlines of Peace, by Séverine Autessere
Two years ago I helped Peace Direct write a report designed to explore and showcase the impacts of local peacebuilding initiatives: actions intended to reduce or prevent violence, initiated by the people who were themselves affected or under threat. With limited time and resources, we produced a report that collected examples from many different countries, making the case that such initiatives deserve more space and support. Unfortunately, too many international organisations still find it difficult to acknowledge, much less actively support and complement such local efforts. The case still needs to be made.
It was with great pleasure therefore, that I sat down to read Séverine Autessere’s new book, The Frontlines of Peace. Autessere is a Barnard College anthropologist well known for her research on international peace efforts. Her book is based on many years’ research on local peacebuilding, and as a result I think I was probably expecting an inventory of hundreds of successful outcomes from all over the world, and a nicely wrought framework for conceptualising and considering local peace initiatives: a more thoroughly researched example of the report we had put together in 2019. Fortunately, I was disappointed.
Instead, her book takes a discursive, deeper approach. Rather than bombarding the reader with a thousand examples drawn from documents and research, she confidently and quietly builds her case using just a few examples, taken from places she knows first-hand. Rather than creating some new academic framework or concept of peace, she trusts that the reader will infer what she is talking about from the way she deploys her examples. And she does this effectively.
As she reminds us, international peacebuilding remains overly focused on national or elite level initiatives. Many of these are devised and driven by outsiders, and thus frequently destined to fail. By contrast, she shows that the core competencies and capacities for peace largely exist within communities, and can be leveraged and strengthened by local organisations and individuals, to reduce the risk and levels of violence affecting those communities. Using examples from places as diverse as East and Central Africa, Central and South America, the Balkans, Northern Ireland and East Timor, she shows how, with limited external support, local peacebuilders have succeeded in resolving tensions and differences without resort to violence, for example negotiating safe passage with local armed militias, and strengthening young people’s ability to resist the lure of recruitment by armed groups.
A practical vision of peace
She doesn’t devote long chapters to setting out an academic definition of peace: her version of peace is an eminently practical idea. If conflict emerges when disputes over resources remain unmanaged or unresolved, then peace means anticipating or resolving these disputes before they get out of hand. It means making sure all perspectives are listened to and taken into account in whatever solutions are proposed. It means retaining this problem-solving focus over the long term, adapting the solutions as new information becomes available, or the situation changes. Ideally, these solutions build on local institutions: the local ‘rules of the game’. Ultimately, they may join up to create a consistently peaceful environment across the whole of society – but in the meantime, it’s important to do what we can.
One example she gives is of farming and herding communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo taking the time to work out how to resolve the tensions between them, and establishing mutually agreed rules so that herds could have space to graze, without damaging farmers’ crops. A very practical solution to an essentially economic conflict that had otherwise been seen by many external observers as primarily ‘tribal’ in nature.
Complementary approaches
Autesserre’s previous book Peaceland contained a strong critique of many external peacebuilding approaches, and she revisits this in Frontlines for Peace. Too many external organisations attempt top-down initiatives, devised and implemented by out-of-touch outsiders with limited local understanding, and they are overwhelmingly focused on national and/or elite level outcomes, paying insufficient attention to the local. And yet, no society can be peaceful nationally for long, while local peace is absent. Local fractures not only undermine societal peace, they are open to exploitation by ‘spoilers’ – political entrepreneurs seeing economic and political power, and all too willing to take advantage of local grievances to achieve their own ambitions, and thus undermine any national peace that may seem to have been achieved.
Therefore, as Autesserre shows, it is not a case of choosing top-down or bottom-up peacebuilding: both are important. Nor are all international attempts to partner with and support local efforts necessarily to be rejected. Provided the internationals take a long-term, listening, humble, supportive and adaptive approach, their financial and technical support and solidarity can enhance local outcomes and help link them up with the more top-down initiatives. Outsiders can also bring useful ideas from other environments, to complement and enrich local knowledge.
Recommended reading for NGOs, and for donor and UN staff
As a peacebuilding practitioner myself, it was enormously reassuring to read an academic work that reinforces many of my own prejudices about the importance of bottom-up peacebuilding. But that’s not to say that I didn’t learn new ideas myself from the book, and I’m sure that would be true for others in the field. So I recommend the book to colleagues in peacebuilding NGOs.
More importantly, I recommend this book to the leaders and staff of donor and UN agencies involved in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Frontlines for Peace is not a manual – far from it – but it quietly and gently sets out a way of thinking about how to work in such places. Too often, people see peace in binary terms: you either have it or you don’t. But, as Autesserre shows, we can think about peace rather as we think about ‘development’ – essentially a work in progress that’s never fully ‘achieved’. We don’t focus development efforts only at a national level, and on the elite: instead we recognise the relevance of local, as well as national development initiatives. We don’t avoid supporting local community schools until the national education policy has reached a level of perfection. Both can be done at once. Similarly with peacebuilding: we don’t need to wait until the nation has achieved ‘peace’ at a national level, before focusing on more local initiatives. Both should be done at once.
Nor, as Autesserre points out, do ‘all good things come together’ – indeed, some of the ‘good things’ like elections can cause as many problems as they are intended to resolve, exacerbating and even creating new conflicts, especially at first. What’s needed is an incremental approach to peacebuilding, and one that builds from the bottom up, even while attempting to create frameworks and policies from the top-down. And uses a long-term approach that listens, is continuously adaptable, and in which local voices and actors take the lead wherever possible.
Some ‘academic’ books are long, hard to penetrate. They can even be arrogant at times – presumably because attack is (sadly) the best form of defence in academia. Frontlines for Peace is not like that. It is written humbly and is highly accessible to a non-academic reader. Perhaps even better, at less than 200 pages it is blessedly short. A Sunday afternoon spent reading this is a Sunday afternoon well-spent.
philvernon.net 