Affect and friendship change the way we think about research (epistemology) and conduct research (methodology). This article accounts for affect and friendship as feminist methods in peace research. It argues that affective feminist conversations, practices and actions through friendship can drastically modify how we think about peace. Based on fieldwork conducted in Colombia (2019 and 2022) with female ex-guerrilleras from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (Farc-ep), it (1) draws upon the concepts of camaradería and being insurgent proposed by the women of the Farc-ep to (2) trace how affect and friendship can change the way we do peace research. Ultimately, the article proposes four aspects for the adoption of friendship as a method in peace research by: 1) deconstructing the linearity in peace research methods; 2) multiplying data collection’s methods; 3) including affects throughout the whole research process and 4) advocating for an insurgent peace research that vindicates long-term ‘transversal politics’ and translocal coalition-building.
What can we expect in terms of security governance in targeted states as international peacebuilding interventions and security sector reform ends? Can we assume that years of reform and capacity building will result in formal security institutions whose function alone can explain stability or instability, sustainable peace or relapses into violence, or even war? In 2018, the United Nations ended its peacekeeping mission in Liberia. Celebrated as a success and role model for future undertakings, scrutinising the UN narrative may appear as a natural starting point for analysing Liberia’s relative stability. Yet, in the Liberian case, formal performance reviews will never be sufficient. This paper, with a conceptual point of departure in theories of hybrid security governance, recognises the continued entangled nature of formal and informal security provision in Liberia. It argues that post-intervention narratives of success should not keep us from assessing security beyond formal state capacity. Instead, holistic approaches are key to understand security governance as non-state security providers are, for better or worse, likely to remain relevant despite years of reform and capacity building.
This article draws on feminist perspectives on the everyday to explore women’s everyday experiences of peace in Kayah state in Myanmar. We locate the daily practices women engage in to maintain life and minimise violence, making visible women’s contributions to everyday peace. In addition, we examine the ways in which women are disproportionally affected by war and prevented from benefitting from post-war changes. Our findings demonstrate that practices of care and silence are key avenues for women’s everyday peacebuilding, through which women sustain peace, ensure survival, and minimise violence in their families and wider communities. At the same time, however, these practices are conditioned by and may contribute to gendered insecurity and marginalisation for women. Through this focus, our analysis shows how women’s positioning in gendered relations of power may both enable their agency in peacebuilding and reinforce their gendered inequality and marginalisation in the post-war period. We conclude that while everyday peace practices may hold the potential for positive change, these can also contribute to the reproduction of inequality, oppression and structural violence.
This paper uses the concept of 'organised hypocrisy' as a means of making sense of the inconsistencies and contradictions in contemporary theory and practice of international state-building. While organised hypocrisy in international politics allows states and organisations to maintain systemic stability and legitimacy by managing irreconcilable pressures that might otherwise render them unable to operate effectively, this paper argues that organised hypocrisy also has negative impacts on the operational effectiveness of state-building. It allows organisations to engage in operations without sufficient resources, thereby seriously undermining operational effectiveness and the credibility of international state-building as a legitimate political tool. Organised hypocrisy also creates false expectations among the local and global populations and thereby decreases the credibility of the strategic narrative that is supposed to explain and make sense of the transformation processes to the general public. The paper also explores a number of options for dealing with organised hypocrisy in a way that could improve the effectiveness of international state-building.
Security sector reform (SSR) is a concept that is highly visible within policy and practice circles and that increasingly shapes international programmes for development assistance, security co-operation and democracy promotion. This paper examines the concept and practice of SSR using theories of the state and state formation within a historical-philosophical perspective. The paper recognises that the processes of SSR are highly laudable and present great steps forward towards more holistic conceptions of security and international development. However, the main argument of the paper is that we should be careful of having too high expectations of the possibility of SSR fulfilling its ambitious goals of creating states that are both stable and democratic and accountable. Instead, we should carefully determine what level of ambition is realistic for each specific project depending on local circumstances. A further argument of this paper is that legitimate order and functioning state structures are prerequisites and preconditions for successful democratisation and accountability reforms within the security sector.
This article explores how societal actors in Somalia take part in a transnational politics of countering/preventing violent extremism (CVE/PVE) through a political sociological approach to militarisation. We argue that the transnational politics of CVE represents an extension of global militarism by some states, institutions, donors and brokers. CVE works to adapt global militarism and to reconfigure the global-local relationships that sustain it. We explore the roles and influence of local ‘CVE brokers’ in deradicalisation efforts in South-central Somalia. They inadvertently merge the counter-terrorism approach to Somali people, values and territory with non-military means. We show that their key practices – co-ordination, translation and alignment – advance, but also disrupt, alter and transform CVE policy objectives.
This paper explores community perceptions about traditional authorities’ roles during the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of former combatants. We have selected the case of Somalia, where both government institutions and traditional authorities have partnered with international actors and institutions, as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE). International actors have related to traditional authorities based on the assumption that these actors wield a kind of social power that facilitates the reintegration of former members of the violent extremist organisation al-Shabaab. Based on mixed methodology research we explain social reintegration in Somalia from the community perspective, and find that P/CVE programmes are expressive of co-optation of traditional authorities. We make the case that ‘risk coping’ helps explain why a majority of civilians prefer the government-led formal reintegration pathway of ex-combatants to the traditional authorities pathway. We conclude by discussing the implications that this has for NGOs/INGOs active in this P/CVE sector.
This Special Issue asks: what is the current place of militarism in relation to security where Africa is concerned? It aims to contribute to emerging debates interested in critical inquiry of the relation between militarism and security, and to explore its diverse articulations in African settings. We advance an international political sociological (IPS) approach to militarism in order to explore militarised security politics as a field of contested practices and logics. We discuss why this approach enables us to uncover the interconnected historical patterns and power relations in which practices and logics of security and militarism become linked and grounded in simultaneously local and transnational African settings.
This article adds to the emerging ‘temporal turn’ in peace studies by addressing methodological questions about how temporality can be captured and explored in empirical studies. Developing our methodological tools for exploring time and temporality, we argue, is critical to move beyond the supposed linear temporality of peace processes, and make visible alternative temporal frameworks that shape everyday experiences and contestations around peace in conflict-affected contexts. Drawing on a study of two conflict-affected areas in Myanmar, we contribute towards this aim through a discussion of how life history diagrams helped us trace temporal conflicts between overarching narratives of political transition and everyday experiences of insecurity. This facilitated a deeper understanding of how relationships between war and peace, and between past, present and future, were manifested and made sense of in people’s everyday lives. Our use of life history diagrams revealed temporal conflicts between the dominant, linear temporality of the Myanmar transition, and more complex and cyclical temporal frameworks people used to describe their realities. Life history diagrams also facilitated narratives that troubled an events-based temporality focused on macro-political shifts such as ceasefire agreements and elections, and instead foregrounded everyday experiences of continuous insecurity and struggle.
In the existing literature, compensation is often understood to be an inferior source of cohesion in military organisations. Through an investigation of the militias who fought for Charles Taylor’s government of Liberia, this paper makes three claims. Firstly, the organisation of these forces was looser than is often claimed in previous literature, which assumes tight and often coercive military patrimonialism. Consequently, the militias did not enjoy the interpersonal bonds of solidarity that have dominated recent cohesion literature. Secondly, since Taylor chose to suppress attempts to build cohesion around ethnicity, it played a subordinate role in unifying the militias. Thirdly, Taylor instead relied on military contracting and compensation, which allowed for the broad mobilisation of forces. The combination of militias’ hopes of inclusion into the state patrimony and insufficient resources to realise this left the cohesion of the militias fragile. Ultimately, this paper questions both whether Taylor had any choice but to resort to compensation in a context with a weak state and fragmented social organisation, and also whether the strategy is as inefficient as often thought.