Description
The post-liberal debate on peacebuilding has acknowledged that in their everyday lives people often manage to cope with and curtail minor tensions, even under circumstances of precarity. Building upon Ethnographic Peace Research and Critical Peace Studies this paper
asks if and how international organisations (IOs) could better support peaceful local ordering. Instead of approaching local-international interaction through the paradigm of the order of self it proposes in-depth ethnographic exploration and understanding of everyday local ordering and peace. Emphasizing the relevance of informality, relationality, translation, mutual learning, collaboration and decentralisation, it warns of neglecting local capacities and issues of (inter)national power. Engaging ethnographic knowledge it demonstrates pros and cons of the liberal peace approach in the case of everyday interactions of Armenians and Azerbaijanis at the Sadakhlo border bazaar in Georgia amidst and in the aftermath of the first Karabakh war. The paper draws attention to the organisation of everyday bazaar relationships and demonstrates how and why international peace-building excluded the
agency of Armenian and Azerbaijani petty traders in trans-border cooperation against the logic of ethnonationalist narratives.
