Reclaiming the local in EU peacebuilding: Effectiveness, ownership, and resistance

Since the early 2000s, the "local turn" has thoroughly transformed the field of peacebuilding. The European Union (EU) policy discourse on peacebuilding has also aligned with this trend, with an increasing number of EU policy statements insisting on the importance of "the local." However, most studies on EU peacebuilding still adopt a top-down approach and focus on institutions, capabilities, and decision-making at the EU level. This special issue contributes to the literature by focusing on bottom-up and local dynamics of EU peacebuilding. After outlining the rationale and the scope of the special issue, this article discusses the local turn in international peacebuilding and identifies several interrelated concepts relevant to theorizing the role of the local, specifically those of effectiveness, ownership, and resistance. In the conclusion, we summarize the key contributions of this special issue and suggest some avenues for further research

Old slogans ringing hollow? The legacy of social engineering, statebuilding and the ‘dilemma of difference’ in (post-) Soviet Kyrgyzstan

This article illustrates the ‘dilemma of difference’ of post-conflict peacebuilding in the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia. Following inter-communal clashes in 2010, the country has received significant support in the form of peacebuilding and conflict prevention programmes and aid. Still, national policy makers retained their sovereignty and carried out peacebuilding in line with the country’s historical legacy and cultural specificities. I illustrate the ‘dilemma of difference’ precluding sustainable peacebuilding and conflict transformation in this context because, as Minow argues, difference and the disadvantage and stigma associated with it is either silenced and ignored or over-emphasised, leading to marginalisation through victimisation. I trace the establishment of a territorialised and essentialised understanding of ethnicity through the social transformations of Kyrgyzstan in the early Soviet and the post-Soviet period. I then show how, since the ‘2010 events’, authorities attempted to do peacebuilding and conflict prevention with appeals to multicultural peace and diversity through the Soviet-era idea of ‘people’s friendship’. Such efforts and corresponding peacebuilding initiatives in southern Kyrgyzstani communities face, as I show, inherent contradictions given exclusionary national-level language and cultural policies and a focus on donor satisfaction which serve to brush over reported tensions, exclusion and conflict

Beyond Silence, Obstacle and Stigma: Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Peacebuilding

Whereas practitioners and mainstream approaches to intervention are concerned about the inability to manage difference in a way that is conducive to peace, critical scholars worry about the inability to write difference without essentializing ‘it’ or reproducing and legitimizing power structures. Can we revert the pessimism regarding the possibility to engage with others sensitively and build peace in a diverse world? In this article, we argue that the current miasma of despair regarding international interventions is the result of three successive errors in the process of seeking to build a peace sensitive to the other: silencing, problematizing and stigmatizing difference. After examining these three errors, we outline three analytical starting points that offer a better understanding of difference: multidimensionality, anti-essentialism, and a focus on power struggles. This discussion opens the Special Issue and hopes to stimulate further conversations on the role of difference in peacebuilding by focusing on its conditions of emergence