Description
Key words: positive peace, political violence, social identity, horizontal inequalities, peacebuilding, conflict transformation, social constructivism
How can positive intra-state peace – peace that is sustainable or embedded in deep socio-cultural structures – be conceptualized? This article provides a social constructivist analysis of the root causes of political violence, that is, horizontal inequalities and fundamental hegemonic struggles across identity groups, as a basis to conceptualize a deep, lasting positive peace beyond the mere absence of manifest violence. Drawing on social identity theory and realist social theory, it focuses on the mostly overlooked influences of social identity on agents’ social practices to analyse the deeply-rooted dynamics of intra-state violent conflicts and theorise a deep root-cause approach to peace and peacebuilding. It therefore conceptualizes deep positive peace as the absence of fundamental conflicts that encompass social identity dynamics leading to out-group discrimination and horizontal inequalities. Grounded in social constructivism, this article proposes a deep positive peace that entails an agential approach. It focuses on the mostly under-examined agential dimension of the agents–structure problem, and social identity dynamics. As such, it offers an alternative and supplement to the prevailing liberal institutionalist and interactionist/relational approaches in the existing research. This article argues that the proposed analytical framework for positive peace can provide a conceptual basis for efforts for ‘sustaining peace’ and fostering a culture of peace.
