Description
What insights can the study of politics, peace, conflict and intervention offer on sustainable ways of building peaceful and secure societies? More than three decades after the fall of Socialist regimes across Eurasia, this aspect remains under-explored in various post-conflict and ‘transitional’ contexts, while cross-regional dialogue and comparison on this aspect have been even more scarce.
Building upon exchange in a network on “Studying Local Ordering and Peace", the present panel aims to fill this void by assembling scholars who inquire ‘what works’ and the enabling conditions for sustainable peacebuilding and security. This analysis aims at embedding ideas of ‘bottom-up’ and ‘local ordering’ in a critical understanding of the regressive logics of present-day politics and international interventions, broadly defined. To this end, the second aspect concerns the actor constellations that foreground ‘local ordering’, including the roles of international organisations, national or sub-national actors like governments, corporations, but also community-level structures and initiatives. The third contribution lies in exploring potentials for comparing and dialoguing across specific contexts in Eurasia, including Central Asia, the Caucasus and (South-)Eastern Europe. This perspective will serve to identify possibilities – and ongoing practices – of transfer, exchange and collaboration in the areas of social and political activism, academic knowledge production and their intersections.
