Birte Vogel

Civil Society Capture: Top-down interventions from below?

ABSTRACT Driven by the failure of internationally led top-down peacebuilding interventions, international donors have increasingly posited that civil society actors can play a crucial role in peacebuilding and conflict resolution. This has led to a notable increase in the support for civil society in order to integrate local perspectives into peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions over the past decades. Using the case of Cyprus, this paper challenges this premise and argues that this support continues to create homogenized discourses that are not representative of the diversity of local notions of peace. Rather, most types of international support cause civil society actors to adapt their agendas to external priorities, and exclude alternative, less professionalized and critical voices. Local peace actors who resist liberal governmentality have access neither to the monetary support needed to sustain their peace work, nor to international protection for their cause. At the same time, those actors working in line with the international endeavour remove themselves from the ‘everyday’ of local realities so that peace interventions yet again fall into the old trap of top-down interventions.

EU support to civil society organizations in conflict-ridden countries: A governance perspective from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Georgia

ABSTRACT From a peacebuilding perspective, EU support for civil society organizations (CSOs) in conflict-ridden countries can be criticized for artificially boosting a liberal, ‘bourgeois’ civil society at the expense of more representative initiatives at the grassroots level. Seen from a governance perspective, however, this criticism is lacking in nuance and conceals the actual rationale and effects of the support. To advance a realistic debate on international peacebuilding as a form of governance, this article investigates what the character and effects of EU support for CSOs in conflict-ridden countries actually are: how does it affect the relations between the supported organizations and (1) the wider society, (2) the state and (3) between the recipient country and the EU? We consider four ideal types of EU conflict governance: ‘liberal peace’, ‘hollow hegemony’, ‘vibrant hegemony’ and ‘post-liberal peace’ and compare them to empirical data from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Georgia. We find that while the objectives of promoting peace and democracy through CSO support tend to fail, the strategic interests of the EU are still maintained.

?Assessing the Impact of EU Governmentality in Post-Conflict Countries: Pacification or Reconciliation??

European Union (EU) interventions in conflict countries tend to focus on governance reforms of political and economic frameworks instead of the geopolitical context or the underlying power asymmetries that fuel conflict. They follow a liberal pattern often associated with northern donors and the UN system more generally. The EUs approach diverges from prevalent governance paradigms mainly in its engagement with social, identity and socio-economic exclusion. This article examines the EUs ‘peace-as-governance’ model in Cyprus, Georgia, Palestine and Bosnia and Herzegovina. These cases indicate that a tense and contradictory strategic situation may arise from an insufficient redress of underlying conflict issues.

Understanding the impact of geographies and space on the possibilities of peace activism

Current peace research has provided scholars with a range of conceptualizations of what peace is. Further, there is a substantial body of literature on the processes used to build peace – the how of peacebuilding. However, there is little research that examines the question of where peace and peacebuilding occur and how these spaces shape the possibilities of non-state actors to achieve their objectives. This article makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to the emerging debate by sketching out the concept of peace spaces and applying it to the United Nations’ controlled Buffer Zone in Cyprus, the geographical home of inter-communal peacebuilding. To determine how geographies impact on the possibilities of non-state peacebuilding actors, the article focuses on three elements, specifically, on how the physical space impacts on: (a) inclusion/exclusion of participants; (b) protection/control through elite actors; and (c) its influence on the discourses and solutions that can be imagined. The article finds that local and international actors alike make a clear connection between the physical space and political viewpoints, which has both enabling and restricting implications.

Economies of peace: Economy formation processes and outcomes in conflict-affected societies

Looking beyond and beneath the macro level, this special issue is interested in the processes and outcomes of the interaction of economic reforms, socio-economic peacebuilding programmes and international interventions with people’s lived realities. Despite decades of international involvement, many of the debates about peacebuilding and conflict prevention are still detached from the basic livelihoods and everyday concerns of citizens in conflict-affected societies. While the formerly strict distinction between conflict-related and development efforts has been problematised and rethought in recent decades (Duffield 2007, Mac Ginty and Williams 2009), the (socio-)economic aspects of peace formation still remain on the margins of the discussion. For instance, the 2016 report of the joint United Nations Development Programme/Department of Political Affairs Programme on Building National Capacities for Conflict Prevention barely mentions economic aspects of peace, entirely omitting any mention of the word ‘economy’ (UNDP 2017). This is puzzling considering the strong focus of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development on socioeconomic matters, including poverty, hunger, decent work, economic growth, reduced inequalities and their intersection with peace and justice. This special issue begins to fill this research gap. We argue that disregarding socio-economic aspects of peace and how they relate to people’s everyday lives leaves a vacuum in our understanding of peace, particularly a just and sustainable peace, and the formation of post-conflict economies. We define ‘postconflict economy formation’ as a multifaceted phenomenon, including both formal and informal processes that occur in the post-conflict period and contribute to the introduction, adjustment or abolition of economic practices, institutions and rules that inform the transformation of the socio-economic fabric of the society. It is influenced by socio-economic legacies from before

Intervention Gentrification and Everyday Socio-economic Transactions in Intervention Societies

Abstract This article calls for a focus on the economic everyday of intervention societies. It opens the debate by demonstrating the effects of intervention gentrification and sketching out different forms of local–intervener interactions. We argue that the majority of economic impacts are localised and connected to immediate geographic proximity and thus require a qualitative methodological approach. Further, many of these implications are of a socio-economic rather than economic nature. To demonstrate this, the article explores interactions and (non-)material transactions between residents in the neighbourhood of Jabal al-Weibdeh, Amman showing how the international presence has transformed the neighbourhood’s infrastructure and norms.