This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Everyday resistance, peacebuilding and state-making addresses debates on the liberal peace and the policies of peacebuilding through a theoretical and empirical study of resistance in peacebuilding contexts. Examining the case of 'Africa's World War' in the DRC, it locates resistance in the experiences of war, peacebuilding and state-making by exploring discourses, violence and everyday forms of survival as quotidian acts that attempt to challenge or mitigate such experiences. The analysis of resistance offers a possibility to bring the historical and sociological aspects of both peacebuilding and the case of the DRC, providing new nuanced understanding on these processes and the particular case. The book also makes a significant contribution to the theorisation of resistance in International Relations.

The everyday, circuitry, and scalability -- Sociality, reciprocity and reciprocity -- Power -- Parley, truce and ceasefire -- Everyday peace on the battlefield -- Gender and everyday peace -- Conflict disruption.

This book examines how the liberal peace experiment of the post-Cold War environment has failed to connect with its target populations, which have instead set about transforming it according to their own local requirements. Liberal peacebuilding has caused a range of unintended consequences. These emerge from the liberal peace’s internal contradictions, from its claim to offer a universal normative and epistemological basis for peace, and to offer a technology and process which can be applied to achieve it. When viewed from a range of contextual and local perspectives, these top-down and distant processes often appear to represent power rather than humanitarianism or emancipation. Yet, the liberal peace also offers a civil peace and emancipation. These tensions enable a range of hitherto little understood local and contextual peacebuilding agencies to emerge, which renegotiate both the local context and the liberal peace framework, leading to a local-liberal hybrid form of peace. This might be called a post-liberal peace. Such processes are examined in this book in a range of different cases of peacebuilding and statebuilding since the end of the Cold War. This book will be of interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, peace and conflict studies, international organisations and IR/Security Studies.

This book explores the powerful role of ordinary people's agency in times of violent conflict. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a Critical Discourse Analysis, the author draws out the motivations, drivers and strategies at individual and community levels. With a focus on people’s own voices, this research highlights rich findings showing a wide range of experiences and actions that people engaged in during the violent conflict, and dimensions that are often missed in dominant explanations of violent conflict. Therefore, while looking at peace and conflict from an everyday perspective, the question of power and the meaning of peace knowledge become central. This monograph addresses the power of people’s agency not only in shaping the politics and dynamics of violence, but also in redefining what ‘peace’ and ‘change’ ought to look like. Essential reading for researchers and students of Peace and Conflict Studies, and also International Relations, Security Studies, Resistance Studies, Anthropology, Politics, International Development.

Everyday resistance is about the many ways people undermine power and domination through their routine and everyday actions. Unlike open rebellions or demonstrations, it is typically hidden, not politically articulated, and often ingenious. But because of its disguised nature, it is often poorly understood as a form of politics and its potential underestimated. Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance' presents an analytical framework and theoretical tools to understand the entanglements of everyday power and resistance. These are applied to diverse empirical cases including queer relationships in the context of heteronormativity, Palestinian daily life under military occupation, workplace behaviors under office surveillance, and the tactics of fat acceptance bloggers facing the war against obesity. Johansson and Vinthagen argue that everyday resistance is best understood by accounting for different repertoires of tactics, relations between actors and struggles around constructions of time and space. Through a critical dialogue with the work of James C. Scott, Michel de Certeau and Asef Bayat, they aim to reconstruct the field of resistance studies, expanding what counts as resistance and building systematic analysis. Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance' offers researchers and students from different theoretical and empirical backgrounds an essential overview of the field and a creative framework that illuminates the potential of all people to transform society.

During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism. Sophie Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change. Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences. Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.

This book explores the prospects and limits of international intervention in building peace and creating a new state in an ethnically divided society and fragmented international order. The book offers a critical account of the international missions in Kosovo and traces the effectiveness of fluid forms of interventionism. It also explores the co-optation of peace by ethno-nationalist groups and explores how their contradictory perception of peace produced an ungovernable peace, which has been manifested with intractable ethnic antagonisms, state capture, and ignorance of the root causes, drivers, and consequences of the conflict. Under these conditions, prospects for emancipatory peace have not come from external actors, ethno-nationalist elite, and critical resistance movements, but from local and everyday acts of peace formation and agnostic forms for reconciliation. The book proposes an emancipatory agenda for peace in Kosovo embedded on post-ethnic politics and joint commitments to peace, a comprehensive agenda for reconciliation, people-centred security, and peace-enabling external assistance.