Reclaiming Everyday Peace Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War

Bringing armed conflicts to an end is difficult; restoring a lasting peace can be considerably harder. Reclaiming Everyday Peace addresses the effectiveness and impact of local level interventions on communities affected by war. Using an innovative methodology to generate participatory numbers, Pamina Firchow finds that communities saturated with external interventions after war do not have substantive higher levels of peacefulness according to community-defined indicators of peace than those with lower levels of interventions. These findings suggest that current international peacebuilding efforts are not very effective at achieving peace by local standards because disproportionate attention is paid to reconstruction, governance and development assistance with little attention paid to community ties and healing. Firchow argues that a more bottom up approach to measuring the effectiveness of peacebuilding is required. By finding ways to effectively communicate local community needs and priorities to the international community, efforts to create an atmosphere for an enduring peace are possible.

Introduction; Part I. Understanding Everyday Peace: 1. Measuring peace; 2. Who counts in the measurement of peace?; 3. A new approach to measuring peace; Part II. Evaluating Everyday Peace: 4. Everyday peace in Uganda and Colombia; 5. The multidimensionality of everyday peace; 6. Why do local interventions fail and why do they succeed?; Conclusion; Appendices.

Pamina Firchow is Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, Virginia. Her main research interests surround the study of the international accompaniment of communities affected by mass violence, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Dr Firchow has received support for her research from the United States Institute of Peace, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rotary Foundation, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the University of Geneva. She has been working in the peacebuilding sector as a scholar-practitioner for non-governmental organizations and universities since 1999.