Description
Everyday life is the taken-for-granted, somewhat internalized day-to-day experience of the social, cultural, political, and economic realities we live in and navigate through. Everyday life does not take place separate from ‘high level’ politics or conflict, rather, these elements (and the power relations within them) are replayed within the everyday. Yet, for most of the 20th century, approaches to, and debates on, peacebuilding and peacemaking have been dominated by an analysis of states and key international institutions. The crisis of liberal peacebuilding has encouraged some scholars to shift their attention to other actors and understandings of peace that might be more culturally grounded and resonate with diverse approaches to peace and peacebuilding. Our paper has two main goals: firstly, it seeks to understand the intellectual and epistemological roots of the everyday peace concept and how it fits within the broader field of IR. Secondly, it explores the potential methodological innovation and applicability to contexts beyond its conceptual birthplace, Northern Ireland, to understand what kind of knowledge(s) can be accessed by studying everyday peace. We set out the broader intellectual shift in Peace and Conflict Studies that allowed a focus on the ‘local’ and the ‘everyday’ in particular. Our paper conceptually interrogates the idea of the everyday, and how the everyday peace lens allows for a different kind of knowledge to be produced beyond Western epistemologies. It engages with how everyday peace methodologically allows for a deeper engagement with the local context in which peace and conflict take place. Conceptually, everyday peace thus moves away from blueprint solutions, through making an effort to understand local issues and solutions, whilst providing an alternative way of looking at conflict dynamics.
