Description
Panel Description
This roundtable brings together scholars at different career stages to explore bottom‑up approaches to peacebuilding, with a particular focus on youth agency, everyday justice, and the relationship between local and global dynamics of conflict and peace. Moving beyond state-centric and institutional frameworks, the panel foregrounds how peacebuilding is enacted in everyday contexts through communities, education, and relational practices.
Across diverse empirical and conceptual cases, including youth engagement, arts-based methodologies, and critical perspectives on selective justice in international law, the contributions examine how peacebuilding is shaped by lived experience, inequality, and contested political realities. The papers interrogate the assumption that peacebuilding is only relevant to sites of overt conflict, instead demonstrating how everyday injustices, social divisions, and institutional failures can generate conditions of fragility even within liberal democracies.
The panel also bridges macro- and micro-level analyses. It considers how global dynamics, such as selective international justice, interact with and are contested through local, bottom-up peacebuilding practices. In doing so, it highlights the importance of connecting global ethics, human rights, and community-based approaches to develop more inclusive and sustainable forms of peace.
Methodologically, the panel showcases innovative approaches, including arts-based and participatory research, which enable young people and communities to articulate their own visions of peace. These approaches not only generate new knowledge but also actively contribute to peacebuilding processes.
By situating peacebuilding within everyday social relations, this roundtable offers new insights into how peace can be cultivated from the ground up in an increasingly fragmented global political landscape.