Description
The idea of ‘everyday peace’ has popped up pretty consistently within the local turn literature over the past decade. While not always sufficiently theorized or fleshed out, it has found its place among the more influential ideas in this sub-field. When speaking about ‘the everyday’ however, these writings are almost always talking about the lives of individuals living within what we commonly frame as conflict-affected or post-conflict states; the local sites where violence ‘lingers’. As such, the everyday is one more thing that is somewhere ‘other’ from the academics, theorists, and policymakers who talk about peace and peacebuilding. However, this paper focuses on how violence at an inter-societal or global scale (usually structural but also regularly direct) becomes an everyday occurrence – so normalized as to be taken for granted – and how such dynamics are, over time and almost imperceptibly, undermining our barely lingering post-Cold War peace. Following recent moves, therefore, to reorient peacebuilding analysis to ‘international peace architectures’ (Richmond 2022) and ‘trans-scalar peace systems’ (Millar 2021), this paper articulates the dangers of everyday violence at an inter-societal scale if what we want to achieve is sustained peace.
