Description
Everyday acts performed by ordinary people in their day-to-day lives have the potential to contribute to the de-escalation of conflict and building of peaceful relationships at the community level. Recent scholarship in Peace and Conflict studies has called for the recognition of these everyday acts as a legitimate form of peacebuilding (e.g. Vaittinen et al., 2019; Mac Ginty, 2021). While this research has (re)positioned the community-level as a meaningful site for peacebuilding and encouraged the broadening of formal peace interventions to include seemingly mundane and informal acts, we have yet to fully explore who is performing this everyday peace, why, under what conditions, and the personal, social, and economic impacts this has on those individuals.
Drawing on in-person qualitative fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper conceptualises everyday peace as a form of labour to reveal the relational, emotional, and voluntary work that people undertake to transform conflict in their communities. In doing so, it highlights how women and other marginalised groups are bearing the brunt of this everyday peace labour in the absence of formalised and funded peacebuilding initiatives – including everyday acts of care, community-building, informal safety and development schemes, and ad-hoc conflict mediation initiatives. As a result, this paper calls for greater acknowledgement of everyday peace as a form of labour within peacebuilding theory and practice. This not only helps us to legitimise and appropriately resource this locally embedded peace work, but also highlights what might be missing from our current formal peacebuilding initiatives at the local and national levels.
