Top-Down and Bottom-Up Narratives of Peace and Conflict
Firchow, Pamina and Roger Mac Ginty. 2016. Politics 36, no. 3: 308-321.
This article investigates and outlines differences that arise in visualizations of peace depending on the conceptual understanding of peace employed. It offers data drawn from the Everyday Peace Indicators project, in which local focus groups in four African states outlined the key features and benchmarks they employed to assess the status of peace in their respective communities. Interestingly, major differences existed between the context-specific indicators selected by local communities and the far broader benchmarks employed by international peacebuilding organizations. This raises major concerns regarding the legitimacy and relevancy of externally-imposed peacebuilding efforts on populations who, in some instances, may possess entirely different f concerns and visualizations of what peace looks like to them.