Third World Quarterly

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The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: scrutinising the

local turn in peace building

Elisa Randazzo

To cite this article: Elisa Randazzo (2016) The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: scrutinising
the local turn in peace building, Third World Quarterly, 37:8, 1351-1370, DOI:
10.1080/01436597.2015.1120154

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Published online: 26 Jan 2016.

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Third World Quarterly, 2016
VOL. 37, NO. 8, 1351–1370
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1120154

The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: scrutinising the local turn in

peace building
Elisa Randazzo
Department of Government, London School of Economics, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

With the advent of the local turn in the mid-2000s, critical approaches Received 21 August 2015
have attempted to rethink peace building from the bottom up, placing Accepted 11 November 2015
local agents at the centre of the debate, declaring the end of top- KEYWORDS
down governance and affirming the fragmented, complex and plural Local turn
nature of the social milieu. While local turn approaches have become peace building
popular in peace-building theory, this article invites the reader to everyday
question and problematise the local turn’s use of the concept of critique
‘everyday’, in order to explore paradoxes and contradictions that liberal peace
indicate the need to think more deeply about the impact of the local
turn’s project of critique.

Introduction
What has come to be known as ‘liberal peace building’ in the literature on post-conflict
management has been identified as the driving logic behind peace-building theory and
practice over the past 20 years.1 Liberal peace building is identified as a largely coherent
paradigm characterised by a fundamental ‘problem solving’ attitude apt at resolving
the symptoms of war, conflict and underdevelopment through a re-engineering of the
foundation of the warring society.2 The aim of this paper is to engage with a particular
set of literature critical of the liberal peace paradigm that emerged in the early-to-mid-
2000s. Renowned peace-building scholars, such as Oliver Richmond and Roger Mac
Ginty, have advocated a turn in the conceptualisation and practice of peace building for
the purpose of acknowledging the limits of liberal peace building, as well as to unsettle
its hegemonic status as a paradigm for peace.3 Proponents of the so-called ‘local turn’
share a common effort to critique the exclusionary, hierarchical and hegemonic practices
of the liberal approach.
These critiques of the liberal peace seek to imagine what Richmond calls an ‘emancipatory
peace’,4 and a new ‘critical agenda for peace’5 that can allow the emergence of the forces of
the ‘everyday’ and of a form of emancipatory governance centred on ‘the solidarity of the gov-
erned’.6 Yet it is important to submit this recent turn to the same level of scrutiny previously
extended to the liberal peace, although notably the aim of this paper is not to ‘save’ liberal

CONTACT  Elisa Randazzo  randazzoelisa@gmail.com

© 2016 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
1352    E. Randazzo

peace building. The paper does this by first framing the rise of local turn approaches in the
context of critiques of peace building outcomes of the mid-2000s; in particular it focuses on
local turn perspectives that bear a consistent emancipatory drive. The paper then explores
claims regarding the end of top-down governance that place the local turn at the centre
of a fundamental re-conceptualisation in the field of peace building in favour of localised,
contingent, iterative processes existing within an everyday realm of agency.
Finally, in the last two sections, the paper examines two core paradoxes emerging with
the emancipatory local turn. It suggests, first, that the local turn’s identification of everyday
agency presents elements of arbitrariness that are difficult to reconcile with the local turn’s
own critical aims of avoiding selectivity and marginalisation. Second, it suggests that the local
turn’s treatment of everyday agency produces a tension between the theoretical imperative
of fragmenting and pluralising the social and political, and what can be understood as a
linear normative effort to critique and replace the liberal peace. These two issues indicate
that the normative assumptions of the local turn have largely been ignored. The normative
drive of the local turn, in fact, facilitates the selection of appropriate forms of behaviour from
unwanted, ‘unbecoming’ ones; this form of selection, it is argued, should be problematised,
as it is no less arbitrary than that which is critiqued by the local turn as a liberal prerogative.

The rise of the local turn

The critical scholarship emerging towards the mid-2000s expressed concern over the impact
of what were increasingly perceived to be heavy-handed interventions initiated in the late
1990s and early 2000s. Calls for the emergence of a new critical approach to peace studies
came to be grounded in the imperative of taking stock of what was identified as a crisis of
liberal peace building.7
The problems identified in the critique range from unstable political settlements in Bosnia,
violent resistance in Cambodia and Afghanistan, mounting legitimacy crises of international
administrations, and the recurrence of violence or increasing volatility of the ‘negative peace’
in places like Kosovo and Iraq, accompanied by the polarisation of certain factions of society
excluded from politics by external actors.8 Critiques of liberal peace building vary, to an extent,
in focus and range of methodologies employed, as well as in theoretical provenance. This paper,
however, focuses on emancipatory perspectives that draw particularly on postmodern methodol-
ogies and research agendas.9 Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a common effort to condemn
top-down approaches employed by liberal peace builders as problematic and limited.10 Despite
differences in focus, critical accounts agree that the project of expanding the reach of liberalism
has operated at the expense of a more nuanced understanding of conflicts, resulting in worsening
security and economic conditions, unsustainable economic growth, economic polarisation, and
continued marginalisation of non-liberal polities.11
Critical perspectives suggest that a gap between international targets and local expectations can be
evidenced across a vast array of missions in the 1990s and early 2000s, from state building in Kosovo, to
peace maintenance in Sierra Leone, to democracy promotion in Iraq. The gap has been attributed to
liberal peace building’s preference for technical exercises in state building,12 based on one-size-fits-all
blueprints and what Boege calls ‘off-the-shelf packages’.13 These projects are said to display little con-
cern for pre-existing forms of governance, traditional and customary institutions, cultural sensitivities,
and/or a complex combination of all of these factors.14 The projects are seen as the embodiment of
the hegemonic tendencies of the liberal peace. The problem of hegemony is framed, in the critiques,
 Third World Quarterly   1353

not just as a discursive reality born out of the absence of any other competing ‘project’ to that of the
liberal peace,15 but also as an inherent aspect of the liberal theoretical underpinnings of the paradigm
itself.16 Critiques focus on the manner in which Western-centric understandings of liberal modernity
have systematically marginalised other non-European types of development.17 Liberal approaches
to development, humanitarian intervention and peace building are said to reflect a normative vision
that relies on inclusion and exclusion at the discursive level, in order to articulate a material image
of what is considered to be a desired form of governance.18 This results in the pathologisation of all
other narratives as abnormal and non-ideal, marginalised in favour of practices that are considered
more acceptable.19 The preference for overarching, Western-born, imposed agendas has also been
associated with a form of cultural hegemony embodied in the inability of external liberal agents to
acknowledge their local counterparts as anything other than a‘homogenous and disorderly Other’, as
Richmond puts it.20 What results is a hegemonic paradigm that practices forms of development and
peace building predicated upon external imposition of ideas and policies and local subordination.21
Critics such as Dillon and Reid suggest that, even when local subjects are empowered to
act within the liberal project, this is mainly a part of a larger liberal plan for the active interven-
tion into, and exploitation of, the nature of the societies subject to peace building. As such,
the type of change generated by the liberal peace’s project of peace building constructs the
idea of the autonomous and responsible subject only insofar as it is instrumentally pertinent
to the implementation of its own agenda and to strengthening the system’s hegemony.22
Indeed, critical approaches suggest that, even where the liberal peace has sought to localise,
donor countries and/or transnational agents should be understood primarily as instruments
of discipline.23 Even the recent shift in the practice of peace building from direct control to
partnership is understood, by scholars such as Jabri, as part of the liberal system’s ability to
change and adapt in order to more efficiently grasp subjects’ conduct.24 These objections to
the liberal peace should be framed within larger trends in IR theory. Indeed, several of the
perspectives consistent with the local turn draw on anti-foundationalist premises, including
insights from postcolonialism, post-structuralism and constructivism, to find appropriate
frameworks for the appreciation of the complex social and political milieu.
The desire to rethink peace building from the bottom up is thus premised on acknowl-
edging the unsuitability of top-down governance, condemned as inherently hegemonic and
out-of-touch with local realities. Consequently, the shift away from top-down implies accept-
ing the importance of local agency, and of the contingencies of the post-conflict milieu. The
central question then raised by critics of the liberal paradigm revolves around how best to
‘access’ all other narratives so far silenced by the predominance of imposed liberal blueprints
of peace building, development and emancipation.25 The reality on the ground, which has
so far escaped the liberal peace, is then suggested to be accessible through the focus on
the local, allowing ‘a new conception of peace-building that is more locally authentic, res-
onant, and agential, to emerge’.26 Moving beyond the framework that dominates orthodox
approaches to the study of peace is necessary, according to Richmond, in order to open up
radical avenues of research and to offer ‘multiple ontologies of peace’.27
It is to this project of radical re-conceptualisation that the article now turns, in order to
understand the impact of the critique of the liberal peace’s hegemony on the emergence of
the local turn. In the course of the exploration, the article will raise the question of the extent
to which the re-conceptualisation of peace building has sufficiently eschewed the potential
for marginalisation so vehemently critiqued as a fallacy of liberal approaches.
1354    E. Randazzo

Emancipatory peace building and the ‘everyday’

Since the problems identified in the previous section are essentially tied to the top-down
nature of peace building, the solution offered to unsettle the primacy of Western forms of
knowledge rests in identifying those forms of agency, knowledge and expertise that are
said to have been alienated and marginalised. In particular, the everyday needs of these
marginalised agents are the focus of bottom-up approaches that replace the rigid, institu-
tional, top-down logic, focusing on the local to rethink the parameters of peace building.
Several scholars point to the need for bottom-up approaches to counter previous top-down
strategies responsible for mere replications of macro-level decisions.28 In this direction Roger
Mac Ginty too has pointed to the need to add ‘trickle-up’ to ‘trickle-down’ development.29
Critiques suggest that moving away from liberal hegemony requires, among other things,
a multi-layered effort to place the local firmly at the centre of the practice of peace build-
ing. The ‘local’ becomes the subject of bottom-up approaches, and is both spatialised and
identified with the geographical location of the recipient population of peace building (that
which is opposed to the ‘international’), as well as being embedded in forms of agency that
are identified according to their resistant qualities, and to their non-mainstream, informal
and often non-liberal nature.30
Countering the hegemony of the liberal paradigm is not, however, merely a question of
a practical change of strategy limited to the furthering of local consultation. Instead, what
is called for is a rethinking beyond the ‘structural’ liberal framework,31 and a reassessment
of the key assumptions behind the project.32 This requires a different conceptual framing
of actors, which can be more reflective of the variety of agency as well as facilitate mutual
accommodation and the rise of political communities.33 It also requires a re-conceptualis-
ation of the relationship between the international and the local, not on the basis of a ‘dichot-
omous binary,’34 but on a dialectical understanding of the relationship between formal and
informal.35 This bears significant consequences for the theoretical project of overturning the
liberal peace, one which begins to clearly trace the contours of a post-liberal methodology
for peace by associating the everyday with the fluid and complex social assemblages of
anti-foundationalist approaches.
Indeed, the bottom-up solution is framed first in terms of engaging primarily with the
informal realm of the everyday, as a way of countering the rigidity of formal, top-down
frameworks. The value of the everyday lies primarily in its non-institutionalised qualities,
which do not subscribe to the objective and universal frameworks of the liberal paradigm.36
This is because, it is explained, complex social relations, as well as local realities, are not linear
processes,37 nor do they necessarily share Western ‘sequential notions of time.’38 Crucially this
places considerable limitations on linear, causal framings of post-conflict management: given
the complexity of post-conflict territories, Goodhand and Hulme suggest that, ‘at best, under-
standing will always be partial, contingencies will play havoc with linear notions of cause
and effect and predictability will be at low levels’.39 The notion of ‘everyday’ then emerges as
an analytical category representing both a practical alternative to the liberal peace and an
acknowledgment of the already existing complex and hybrid ontological nature of post-con-
flict societies. The everyday is valued as a realm of complex interconnectedness where mul-
tiple actors and networks exist, interact and overlay, ‘without necessarily resulting in the
domination of one core identity or idea’.40 Despite the different terms employed to qualify
the everyday (eg the ‘mundane’, the ‘hidden’, the ‘marginalised’, the ‘local-local’, the ‘authentic’,
 Third World Quarterly   1355

the ‘hybrid’), what local turn perspectives have in common are their portrayal as a social plane
of agency and meaning that can be accessed, and indeed should be accessed, to engage
with local realities and concerns beyond the mere realm of ‘high’ politics and institutional
set-ups and beyond the intransigence demonstrated by the liberal peace.41 The everyday
realities on the ground, Richmond claims, have one crucial critical function in that they ‘add
additional dimensions and sensitivities and the ontological dimension that they imply’.42
Notions such as ‘hybridity’, ‘everyday’ and ‘local-local’, while not being interchangeable or
necessarily synonymous, shed light upon a common assumption of the local turn in rela-
tion to the ontological nature of social relations forming everyday political and social local
realities.43 Indeed, it is suggested that the everyday is a terrain of shifting identities, a space
of interplay between hybrid identities. 44 In peace building the everyday becomes a point
of contact with which to engage local actors, from disenfranchised groups to elites, from
subaltern to what Richmond calls the ‘local-local’ – the local agents beyond the stereotypes
generated around civil society.45 The everyday is then not only a factual contingent reality,
but is also employed, by the critiques, as a tool to access previously marginalised narratives.
Its hybrid quality would, in fact, shed light on the, ‘unscripted conversations’, ‘infrapolitics’,
intentions and strategies of a wider variety of local actors beyond the elites typically engaged
by the liberal peace, beyond the ‘virtual’ image of peace imposed from the top.46
As such, a tension begins to emerge between the use of the everyday as a factual descrip-
tor for the reality of social and political interactions and its use as a facilitator for the nor-
mative aims of an emancipatory paradigm that seeks to find, as Tadjbakhsh argues, ‘a new
conception of peace-building that is more locally authentic,’.47 The tension between the
non-linear approach to the everyday and the normative drive also brings forward a relevant
question for the critics of the liberal peace.48 Is it possible that the shift towards localisation,
hailed as conceptually different from the liberal paradigm and its tendencies and outcomes,
could also unwittingly produce similar dualisms and elements of arbitrariness that the cri-
tique usually associates with liberal peace building? If the liberal peace is at fault because
its linear normative approach to emancipation has produced a narrow and exclusionary
approach to development and peace building, is it at all possible that the local turn’s own
project of emancipation might be capable of similar problematic tendencies? The article
now turns to unwrapping the paradox between the non-linear ethos of the local turn and
the linear telos of emancipation that drives its project of re-conceptualisation.

The selectivity paradox

The identification of what agency to valorise as part of the everyday realm raises some
important questions concerning the wider analytical purposes of the local turn. The manner
in which everyday agency is identified suggests that re-conceptualising peace building
beyond the liberal paradigm is not only an acknowledgment of the complex nature of every-
day realities; when it is framed as an alternative it also represents a more profound political
project of change. While it may be possible to agree with the local turn approaches in the
identification of how certain dominant practices and technologies have been extended to
further facilitate the control of the conduct of societies,49 it is also important not to cast aside
any critical and analytical drive and assume that this pattern has now ceased with the advent
of a new turn towards the local and the post-liberal. In particular, the local turn’s treatment
of the everyday brings attention to two potentially problematic tendencies. First, framing
1356    E. Randazzo

the everyday as a starting point for bottom-up practices requires a form of identity making
through which agency is identified, which brings up the problem of selectivity. Second, and
relatedly, this is also arguably inconsistent with the local turn’s own theoretical preference
for blurring identity boundaries and for fostering interconnectedness and plurality, as will
be examined in the last section of the article.
The paradox of selectivity can be best exemplified by looking at the relationship between
the local turn and violence. Notably distinguishing violent from non-violent forms of local
agency is not only practically difficult (particularly as some struggles have changed their
approaches over time, and as the thin line between violence and lack thereof is filled with
different, blurry and nebulous quasi-violent methods), it also implies a high degree of sub-
jective judgement. Despite the rhetorical commitment to a plurality of expressions of the
everyday, when certain forms of agency are chosen over others, these are identified and
rendered legitimate in a manner which is not immediately evident to the reader and is done
without much exploration of the normative content and effects of this legitimisation. Mitchell
and Kelly’s work on Northern Ireland and Bosnia, for instance, explores how populations have
reclaimed spaces previously appropriated by liberal peace builders (eg areas that had been
designated for certain development projects) by exercising everyday forms of occupation
and resistance as graffiti.50 This exploration of the methods with which populations express
their discontent with the policies imposed by outside agents is useful in drawing attention to
the arbitrary nature of foreign interventions and is a prime example of the local turn’s project
of rethinking peace building from the bottom up. At the same time, however, it does little
to explain why agency seems to be expressed mostly through resistance, or why resistance
is expressed in that particular way rather than in other ways (why drawing graffiti and not
launching rockets?); nor does it say much about what other types of agency these subjects
could be expressing and where this could be visible beyond the territorialised and spatially
specified areas of friction and contestation.
Discourses of local agency are also often geared towards peace-promoting agents. This
can be seen in Albrecht and Wiuff Moe’s focus on traditional African tribal chiefs, believed
to be able to interact fruitfully with both international agencies and traditional structures.
Likewise Boege’s analysis of the relative success of state building in Bougainville rests on
acknowledging the positive impact of local-based legitimacy, such as that embodied by cus-
tomary leadership figures like elders and chiefs, in pursuing a form of ‘non-violent conduct of
conflict’.51 Yet, If the acceptability of local agency were to hinge on its positionality regarding
conflict/non-conflict, this would rely on a binary distinction not just of local/international
(which is what critics such as Sabaratnam, Heathershaw, and Hameiri have already cautioned
against52) but also, importantly, between violence and non-violence. Indeed, some forms of
agency have clearly been assessed on the basis of their violent/non-violent expression.53 In
accounts on Kosovo this is particularly evident. In her discussion of local civil society Devic,
for instance, launches a critique against liberal, Western-style multiculturalism as a limit to
the potential of local civil society and local everyday forms of multiculturalism. At the same
time, however, Devic also warns against the dangers of ‘“less civil” sectors of civil society,
such as the KLA veterans’ associations’, which she considers responsible for the March 2004
violence.54
Fawn and Richmond also point to the agency of local actors, while at the same time warn-
ing against traditional pre-conflict forms of elites, who may use their agency to manipulate
the process of peace building towards a particularist and ethnocentric view of the exercise of
 Third World Quarterly   1357

sovereignty; the two scholars point to Kosovo and Republika Srpska as evidence of two such
polities that exhibit ‘ethnic sovereignty’ as opposed to ‘shared governance’ and thus present
hostile activist groups that continue ‘to engage in extensive symbolism to demonstrate [their]
ethnic construction’.55 Within this framework elite politics as well as local activism become
problematic signs of ethnocentrism. Richmond also further hints at the existence of ‘civil’
forms of everyday agency as opposed to ‘uncivil’ ones.56 This is not unproblematic and is,
in fact, predicated on generalisations and arbitrary definitions of what ‘violence’ or ‘conflict’
would consist of and what forms these struggles may take. Their allocation to either camp
for the identification and promotion of ‘non-violent ways of conflicting’ would similarly be
as arbitrary as more traditional, linear attempts to identify acceptable non-violent forms of
confrontation.57 This also means that, while ‘positive’ forms of agency are given more atten-
tion, very little attention is paid to destructive interactions, something Oliver Ramsbotham
calls radical disagreement,58 or even to multiple, shifting and simultaneous registers of inter-
actions, where agents’ agendas, wants and needs may be increasingly difficult to pin down.
This also means that the problematisation of violence remains unexplored, without much
understanding of why a paradigm may refuse to engage with or understand violent behav-
iour, and may prefer to engage with forms of everyday agency that may, paradoxically, still
only represent a portion of the everyday and only the one that is more easily interrogated,
approached, co-opted or ‘made visible’.
The unclear logic that drives the legitimisation of the alternative voices in need of eman-
cipation finally raises a core question related to the conceptual logic of the critique, namely,
what dictates the terms and characteristics of what or who needs to be emancipated, how,
and in what direction. The selection of which agency to valorise as the ‘authentic’ everyday
beyond the fiction of the liberal peace,59 indicates an unwillingness to engage with the
local turn’s own normative aspirations and, possibly, with its potential for marginalisation.
Indeed, where the local turn has critiqued the relationship between the liberal and the local
as one dictated by manipulation and instrumentalisation, it is necessary to question what
is at stake when it is the local turn that selects what agency to valorise. The identification of
the everyday in its physical expression is placed in the service of a normative plan to avoid
those practices that choose co-option over a more ‘authentic’ or organic form of exchange
with everyday realities.60 When the local turn attempts to separate the fiction provided by
the liberal paradigm from the ‘authentic’ everyday, it arguably operates not only a form of
selection, but also a form of ‘normalisation’,61 which seeks to access these more ‘authentic’
expressions of agency while ‘outlawing’ other ‘unbecoming’ actors and behaviours.62
The normalisation operated by the local is mostly visible in its naturalisation of certain
qualities of the everyday, those that are privileged because of their position within the
normative vision of the local approach. For instance, several authors have more than once
assumed that local forms of justice making, like the Gacaca courts in Rwanda and the Loya
Jirga in Afghanistan are valuable ways of getting to a peace that is naturally closer to the
society it is meant to affect.63 Nonetheless it is not clear why these forms of ‘local’ customs
and justice are chosen over others that are just as ‘local’, though less likely to be understood
within a Western-centric understanding of the local. For instance, clan based solutions are
celebrated in some cases (in Rwanda or Afghanistan) but supposed to be problematic in
other contexts, like in Kosovo, where solutions driven by one ethnicity or based on ethnic-
ity are merely condemned as repeating the mistakes of ethnicised peace building that the
liberal approach is responsible for.64 In other cases certain forms of local agency are implied
1358    E. Randazzo

as problematic as, for instance, in the case of guerrilla groups that have ‘transformed very
quickly into political parties’; where their methods may often rely on the use of ‘the language
of liberation’, Mac Ginty and Williams warn against these elites ‘too narrowly based agendas’
that may ‘merely continue the civil wars by peaceful means’.65
When certain actions, behaviours, actors and patterns are naturalised as ‘abnormal’,
without much explanation of how a specific act is framed as problematic or inappropri-
ate (and how, by consequence, other behaviour is accepted and justified), the process
of normalisation that even the local paradigm might be exercising is then obscured (ie
why is co-option such a bad word? What happens if a local wants to be ‘liberal’?). One
could suggest that the local turn’s critique of the liberal peace and the consequent
wholehearted call to empower the local obscures how certain behaviour and acts are
singularly identified as forms of domination, and how certain others are not. It is now,
for instance, widely accepted in critical circles that the liberal peace disempowers local
voices, in spite of its attempts to devolve power, or of the locals’ desire to be ‘liberal’.
Indeed, while resistance to the ‘liberal’ peace is widely registered, it is also possible to
see that accounts of local support for the liberal peace and its initiatives tend to be
easily explained away by the critics as co-option or imposition, ultimately placing most
of the negative connotations of co-option onto the ‘liberal’ peace. Likewise the critics
do not expand on why local agency may express itself in a ‘liberal’ form and what this
might mean for the post-liberal project. Richmond, for instance suggests that ‘liberalism
tolerates or co-opts while contextualism resists, modifies and adopts’.66 What this may
also cause is an almost instinctive association of issues such as marginalisation and
alienation with an immediate culprit, at the expense of questioning and examining
whether other systems, orders, actors or narratives, may also advocate practices that
can result in marginalising people and narratives.
The normative dimension of the local turn’s suppositions has so far not been openly
engaged with in critical accounts themselves. In a 2015 article Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver
Richmond mention the emancipatory drive of the local turn’s paradigm as its strongest
suit.67 These scholars reject the need to qualify or specify the nature of emancipation or
to engage with the possible contradiction that arises between emancipatory claims and
their anti-foundationalist theoretical framework, however.68 Furthermore, the authors do
not explore the crucial normative implications of the local turn’s project, engaging with
emancipation at a rhetorical and nominal level only. This has had the effect of clouding
the meaning of the ‘emancipatory’ component of the paradigm, as well as to continue to
encourage an unreflective approach to the selection of everyday agency. Here, the issue at
stake is the denial of the normativity and the normalising effects that the latter has on indi-
viduals and societies. As the local turn raised a critique against the liberal peace’s selective
and marginalising engagement with local voices, it is also necessary to reflect on the effects
of the local turn’s own normalisation processes. Admittedly this should not be taken as an
ethics-based critique of the emancipatory approaches to peace building but, rather, as a way
of bringing to attention the manner in which the local turn may run the risk of exercising
a form of normalisation not dissimilar to that encountered in linear frameworks, in that it
promotes the uncritical acceptance of concepts (ie the everyday, the local, the hybrid, the
resisting agent) that are presented as natural.
 Third World Quarterly   1359

The paradox of spatialising identity

The notion of the everyday is particularly important to the project of rethinking peace build-
ing beyond the liberal peace, in that it directly challenges one aspect of liberal hegemonic
discourses, namely, the reliance on spatial division between identities. The issue of spatiali-
sation is important to those perspectives in the local turn that are influenced by anti-foun-
dationalist theories, particularly those that are concerned with fostering interconnectedness,
contingency and iterative processes within networks.69
The spatialisation of identities operated within the linear liberal paradigm is responsible,
according to critiques, for the binary representations of actors and agendas that solidify the
processes of domination of the hegemonic meta-narrative, particularly as these often rely
on pre-existing stereotypical or even racist accounts of the non-European other. Jabri, for
instance, suggests that modernist understandings of conflict included cultural differences
only to ‘determine the legitimate, the acceptable, the righteous and the barbarian’; cul-
tural identity was used to produce subjects that are ‘categorised and spatialised, shaped in
accordance with the rationalisations of discursive and ultimately institutionalised modes of
identification […] such rationalisations are often interlaced with friend/enemy identifications.’
70
Binaries are problematic in that they create a universe of ‘spatialised units of analysis,’
which support the provision of ‘a temporal logic’ to processes such as development or failure;
these binary assumptions are said to forego other relational perspectives that can open up
to multiple understandings of social change, which is a fundamental aim of the local turn.71
To counter these effects, relational views of peace building that typically animate the
local turn would understand the everyday as a realm of contingent relationality, a starting
point whose function is to focus or centre the discussion on the local not as a unitary and
homogeneous identity marker, but rather as a multiple, messy assemblage of hybrid net-
works, where the identification of clear-cut identities and agendas is discouraged. Within
this understanding accessing the everyday is called upon as a way to avoid doing violence
to the heterogeneity of existence. Mac Ginty and Richmond, exemplify this belief:
These localised epistemologies and discourses are distinct from Western modes of thinking in
one important respect: their variance. The sheer heterogeneity of the sources of localised think-
ing and expression means that there is no neat framework of ideas and that any genealogy of
a universal norm or institution will tend to uncover hidden injustices that need to be rectified.
The local turn is characterised by a cacophony of thinking.72
The everyday then becomes the main source of resistance to top-down, exclusionary and
formal spatialisation, visible in the ways in which citizens refuse to be identified with a par-
ticular ethnicity, such as the case of people refusing to specify their ethnic provenance in
Bosnia or across the Green Line in Cyprus.73
The local turn’s preference for frameworks that celebrate contingency and complexity
suggests that the salience of spatial registers, binaries and identity markers is reduced. Since
social interventions like peace building are framed as no longer able to understand and gov-
ern social interactions from the top,74 the local turn seems to indicate the end of top-down
governance to be the ultimate fragmentation of power and the acknowledgment that the
very issue of governing populations goes beyond establishing vertical structures that tie the
authorities to the land, through the population. The local turn also seems to be suggesting
that governance itself depends on the acknowledgment of the undisputable underground
forces of the contingent everyday and their fluid, non-linear, relational nature. Within this
1360    E. Randazzo

understanding the identification of clear identities is discouraged to avoid reductionism,75

preferring a relational view that would, at least in theory, leave the boundaries of the hybrid
open and undefined in order to focus on the ‘inbetweenness’.76 It is then possible to see the
everyday both as a factual acknowledgment of the complexity of the social milieu and as a
tool employed by the local turn to actively resist and oppose the liberal paradigm, as well as
to renegotiate it and alter it; as Richmond says, in fact, the value of understanding everyday
agency lies also in seeing ‘the ongoing renegotiation of the liberal peace via local agency
and its resistances’.77In this case it is then possible to question how the everyday resists spa-
tialisation and facilitates fragmentation and non-linearity, without resorting to more rigid,
vertical governance structures that the liberal peace has so far employed.
As an example, the local turn’s treatment of hybridity highlights a tension between the
attempt to valorise the blurriness of the lines that run along actors,78 and the practice of
hybridising certain practices and processes, which requires the selection, identification
and spatial qualification of identities. This is identified by Millar as the tension between the
descriptive and prescriptive function of hybridity; in the scholarship, the author suggests,
different levels of hybridity are under-theorised and relationships, intentions and agendas
assumed to be predictable and quantifiable.79 This is also problematic because, as Visoka
suggests, processes of ‘prior hybridisation’ also need to be taken into account when discuss-
ing levels of hybridity.80 While Visoka is correct in suggesting that these nuances have not
been addressed by the scholarship of the local turn, and that Millar has correctly identified
the need to acknowledge that ‘hybrid governance [is] unlikely to produce predictable local
experiences [and] may have unpredictable and potentially even conflict-promoting effects’,81
one could also go a step further and argue that there is a fundamental difficulty in discussing
the hybrid everyday without resorting to lines of difference. Indeed, the theoretical pref-
erence for non-linearity and interconnectedness found in the core claims of the local turn
would imply a pluralisation of governance structures in a manner which may, necessarily,
fragment any forms of governance (even the ones that could be seen as ‘acceptable’ or ‘sal-
vageable’) to the point of making them unrecognisable in their ‘new’, pluralised, hybrid and
interconnected forms. This would not only make identity labels redundant and ineffective,
it would also imply that the ‘liberal’ and its ‘unbecoming’ qualities, could become invisible or
indistinguishable in its already hybridised form and that the ‘local’ may, in itself, go through
the same fragmentation.
To be sure, the acknowledgment of the untraceable links that produce ‘already existing’
hybrid identities,82 and of the inevitable processes that connect and change individuals inside
networks,83 runs contrary to the process that takes place when hybridity is used as a tool
to ‘draw out’ unscripted and hidden practices of the everyday, ie to make the invisible and
blurry, visible. Indeed, the manner in which these identities are recognised, given meaning
and valorised, raises an important question: if the local is the subject to be emancipated, how
can the concept of hybridity do that conceptually – let alone practically – without delimit-
ing and constraining in a binary way the identities of local and international actors? Since
the effort to identify and make visible hidden everyday realities implies the separation of
identities that supposedly make up the untraceable networks of complex, hybrid relations, it
seems that a paradox begins to form. Complexity and hybrid plurality are, on the one hand,
valorised as material realities within which the exercise of separating the international from
the local is discouraged by critical approaches. Yet, on the other hand, the expectation of
identifying and separating the authentic from fictional and stereotypical representations of
 Third World Quarterly   1361

the everyday – which is a crucial part of the critique of the liberal peace’s engagement with
the local – requires carrying out precisely that same form of boundary making that separates
identities in order to pursue its alternative normative project and, thus, negates hybridity or
complexity. Indeed, the practice of accessing the complex everyday is, arguably, one that
strikes at the core of the tension between the end of top down governance and the linearity
of normative projects of emancipatory peace making. It is when the ‘abstracted’ idea of the
everyday is enacted that it is possible to identify a form of spatialisation that facilitates the
emergence of certain forms of local agency, and which, however, runs against the principle
of non-linearity that animates the local turn’s attempt to open up space for the conceptu-
alisation of multiple and plural ontologies of peace. To unsettle the primacy of the liberal,
these approaches need to then identify (and thus inherently separate) identities, relying on
representations of individual agency. Among notable examples is worth mentioning Mitchell
and Kelly’s resisting graffiti city-scape of Belfast, and Watson’s knitting circles of Bosnia as
forms of informal, everyday activism.84 These perspectives tend to identify agency itself in
its positionality (ie where it is physically located) or functionality (ie the physical evidence
of the acts it performs).
The issue to highlight here is not so much the spatial identification of identities per se
but the failure to acknowledge that the reliance on scalar categories that follows such
identification is a form of embedding the subject within social structures, and power
relations, that are not neutral, nor symmetrical, and that this re-conceptualisation of
peace building is not conceptualised in a vacuum but within a highly normative con-
text. Indeed, the attitude towards identities is symptomatic of a tension in the local turn
between the need to celebrate ‘alterity’, agonism and difference,85 while on the other
hand blurring the dividing lines between positions and identities in the complex and
interconnected everyday.86 This means that, despite acknowledging the heterogeneous
and at times murky and indistinguishable nature of the assemblages that shape these
networks as social spaces, the local turn operates an embedding of individuals in modes
of spatial organisation.87 This is a form of spatialisation of its own, which is operated
through the identification of the identities, agendas and goals of certain actors, often
qualified by their stance vis-à-vis the normative framework of critique of the liberal
peace. Indeed, it is important to note that this process of critique entails a form of ‘spa-
tialisation’ of agency that carries no less potential for marginalisation than any other
master-narrative prior to the local turn.
In its dream to declare the end of top-down governance and to liberate the subjects
of peace building from the trappings of hegemony and hierarchy, it may well be that
the local turn has inadvertently captured the discourse of peace building in the neb-
ulous web of the ‘everyday’, which reveals little conceptual clarity. I have argued that
unpacking the notion of ‘everyday’ in the local turn in the context of the normative
aspirations of the critique of the liberal peace may shed light upon an emergent tension
between a loose understanding of an apolitical, abstracted everyday realm of agency
and a militant, normative understanding of what societies should look like (resisting,
hybrid, post-liberal, ‘authentic’, etc). The notion of the everyday can be understood as a
double-edged sword, one that has indeed challenged the rigidity of the liberal peace,
but one that has been severely hindered by its biased and ambiguous relationship with
both its anti-foundationalist roots and normative aspirations.
1362    E. Randazzo

Conclusion
Peace building has witnessed continued conceptual expansion since the early 1990s through
shifts and ruptures that have challenged the orthodoxy and played with the conceptual
borders of the field. The core aim of this paper has been to further contribute to the wide
scholarly debates on peace building by subjecting the latest re-conceptualisation of peace
building – the local turn – to scrutiny. The article has neither sought to normatively discour-
age the local turn nor to ‘save’ liberal peace building nor establish an objective critique of the
feasibility of the local turn and its bottom-up approaches. Rather, it has sought to disturb
some of the assumptions that lie behind the local turn’s more visible critical, emancipatory
and benevolent façade.
Where the local turn’s critique of liberal peace building declared the impossibility of relat-
ing to everyday realities in the old framework that gave precedence to top-down solutions,
the local turn itself proposed a normative solution of accessing everyday authentic forms of
being in the world from the bottom up and the local. In an attempt to use the concept of the
everyday as an alternative to the top-down approach of the liberal peace, the framing of the
everyday has come to be framed as the starting point in the struggle to uncover the hidden
narrative and transcripts of peace. As a consequence of the normative, emancipatory drive
of the local turn, it has been argued, local agency has come to be identified, delineated and
then judged on the basis of pre-established normative ideas regarding the social order, as
a direct reaction to what were perceived to be the ills of an ‘unbecoming’ liberal paradigm.
The difficulties of identifying and valorising the ‘local’ expressions of the everyday,
I have argued, have pointed to two important paradoxes that indicate a strong need
for conceptual clarity. The first concerns the difficulty of maintaining a preference for
all forms of everyday agency and to therefore counter the liberal tendency to pick and
choose only those forms conforming to the liberal vision and to discard all other alter-
natives. Indeed, the manner in which authentic everyday agency is differentiated from
the ‘fiction’ provided by the liberal peace is, by and large, unexplained. Second, given
the ambiguous status of the normative standing of the emancipatory local turn, every-
day agency that is often identified as a starting point for frameworks of ‘hybridity’ and
‘resistance’ often requires the local turn to resort to binary language that spatialises and
qualifies identities. This runs fundamentally contrary to the local turn’s initial objective
of pluralising the everyday and focusing on ‘interconnectedness’ and on the blurred
lines of identity.
What these paradoxes suggest is a wider tension between attempts to fragment
governance to declare the end of top-down peace building and the desire to emanci-
pate agents and make the invisible visible. What this tension indicates is the need for a
clearer exploration of what emancipatory peace building looks like within a theoretical
framework that seeks to acknowledge multiplicity, contingency and the end of hier-
archies. Engaging with the content of the normative aspect of the local turn itself by
facing directly the tension between non-linearity and emancipatory claims may bring a
more nuanced approach to the field, in that it may bring to the fore the potential of all
paradigms to exercise exclusionary practices, regardless (and possibly precisely because)
of their transformative intent.
 Third World Quarterly   1363

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, Aidan Hehir and Pol Bargués-Pedreny for their
comments on an earlier draft, and the reviewers for their insightful remarks.

Notes on Contributor
Elisa Randazzo is teaching fellow in the Government Department at the London School of
Economics. Her current research interests concern the shifts in conceptualisation of peace
building as well as questions concerning hybridity and local ownership in peace building
and state building.

Notes
1. Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” 56.
2. Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making,” 146.
3. See Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace”; Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making”; and Boege et
al., “Building Peace.”
4. Richmond, Peace in International Relations.
5. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building.”
6. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 234.
7. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building,” 766; and Richmond, “A Post-liberal
Peace.”
8. Donais, Peacebuilding and Local Ownership, 95; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal
Peace”, 226–244; Lemay-Hébert, “The Bifurcation of the Two Worlds”; and Newman, “A Human
Security Peace-building Agenda,” 1745.
9. Critiques on peace building vary greatly in provenance, from within the liberal paradigm itself, to
neo-gramscian, constructivist Foucauldian and neo-materialist perspectives. See, respectively,
Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding”; Selby, “The Myth of Liberal Peace-building”; Hehir,
“Introduction”; Duffield, “The Liberal Way of Development”; and De Coning, “Understanding
Peacebuilding as Essentially Local.” Recent perspectives on peace building that focus local
agendas, but do not place as much emphasis on emancipation, include research that prioritises
the attainment of order and stability. See, for instance, Hughes and Hutchinson, “Development
Effectiveness”; and Mulaj, “The Problematic Legitimacy of Internationally-led State-building.”
10. See Campbell, “Construing Top-down as Bottom-up”; Felix da Costa and Karlsrud, “Contextualising
Liberal Peacebuilding”; Hameiri, Regulating Statehood; Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu, “The OECD’s
Discourse on Fragile States”; and Wolff, “Post-conflict State Building.”
11. Smoljan, “The Relationship between Peace Building and Development,” 245; and Jahn, “The
Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: (Part I).”
12. Brown and Gusmao, “Looking for the Owner of the House.”
13. Boege, “Hybrid Forms of Peace and Order,” 104.
14. Caplan, “Who Guards the Guardians?”; Chandler, Empire in Denial; Mac Ginty and Richmond,
“The Local Turn in Peace Building”; and Wilde, “Colonialism Redux?”
15. Hopgood, “Reading the Small Print in Global Civil Society,” 2.
16. Jahn, “The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: (Part II)”; and Jahn, “The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy:
(Part I).”
17. Duffield, “The Liberal Way of Development”; Jabri, “War, Government, Politics”; Pugh, “Towards
Life Welfare”; and Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding and Global Governance.
18. See Demmers et al., Good Governance.
19. Chandler, Bosnia, 148; and Pugh, “Transformation in the Political Economy of Bosnia.”
20. Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism,” 325.
21. Jahn, “Kant, Mill, and Illiberal Legacies”; and Joseph, “Globalization and Governmentality.”
1364    E. Randazzo

22. See Hynek, “Rethinking Human Security”; Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War; Franks, “Beware
of Liberal Peacebuilders”; Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development; and Richmond,
“Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace”, 665–692.
23. For comprehensive accounts of liberal forms of discipline as they pertain to international
governance and discourses of development and capacity building, see Debrix, Re-envisioning
Peacekeeping; and Larner and Walters, Global Governmentality.
24. Baskin, “Local Governance in Kosovo,” 88; Boege et al., “Building Peace and Political Community,”
612; and Jabri, “Peacebuilding, the Local and the International.”
25. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 234; Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-
liberal Peace”, 226–244; Mac Ginty, “Introduction”; and Lidén, “Building Peace”.
26. Tadjbakhsh, “Introduction,” 7.
27. Richmond, “Reclaiming Peace in International Relations,” 454.
28. See, for instance, Felix da Costa and Karlsrud, “Contextualising Liberal Peacebuilding.”
29. Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Reconstruction,” 210–211.
30. Kraushaar and Lambach, Hybrid Political Orders, 1.
31. Shinko, “Agonistic Peace,” 474.
32. Richmond, “Foucault and the Paradox of Peace-as-Governance.”
33. Bliesemann de Guevara, “Introduction,” 121; and Boege, “Hybrid Forms of Peace and Order.”
34. Sabaratnam, “Situated Critiques of Intervention,” 260.
35. Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace.
36. Robins, “An Empirical Approach,” 51.
37. Bush, “Commodification, Compartmentalization, and Militarization”; Castañeda, “How Liberal
Peacebuilding may be Failing”; Darby and Mac Ginty, “Conclusion”; and Lederach, “Cultivating
Peace.”
38. Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making,” 149.
39. Goodhand and Hulme, “From Wars to Complex Political Emergencies,” 24.
40. Richmond, “Reclaiming Peace in International Relations,” 457.
41. Pouligny, Peace Operations; Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism”; Richmond,
“Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace”, 665–692; and Shinko, “Agonistic Peace,” 487–489.
42. Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace,” 575.
43. Jarstad and Belloni, “Introducing Hybrid Peace Governance,” 4.
44. Heathershaw and Lambach, “Introduction.”
45. Richmond, “Becoming Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism,” 331.
46. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, 234; Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, 18;
Belloni, “Hybrid Peace Governance,” 31; Lidén, “Building Peace between Global and Local
Politics”; Richmond and Franks, “Liberal Hubris?”; and Richmond, “UN Peace Operations.”
47. Tadjbakhsh, “Introduction,” 7.
48. Non-linear perspectives, originating in computational and information system studies have
been embraced by scholars of post-conflict peace building who seek to make sense of the
manner in which responses to conflict have been framed so far and how best to encapsulate the
reality of conflict territories without reducing them to the sum of their parts. See, for instance,
Burns, “Facilitating Systemic Conflict Transformation”; Körppen, “Space beyond the Liberal
Peacebuilding Consensus”; Chandler, “Peacebuilding and the Politics of Non-linearity”; and
Vimalarajah and Nadarajah, “Thinking Peace.”
49. See Debrix’s account of international forms of liberal discipline operated through a multitude
of ‘global surveillance mechanisms’. Debrix, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping, 84.
50. Mitchell and Kelly, “Peaceful Spaces?”
51. Albrecht and Wiuff Moe, “The Simultaneity of Authority,” 15; and Boege “Vying for Legitimacy,”
247.
52. See Sabaratnam, “Situated Critiques of Intervention”; Heathershaw, “Towards Better Theories
of Peacebuilding”; and Hameiri, “A Reality Check.”
53. See, for instance, Mitchell and Richmond, “Introduction,” 24.
54. Devic, “Transnationalization of Civil Society in Kosovo,” 262.
55. Fawn and Richmond, “De Facto States in the Balkans.”
 Third World Quarterly   1365

56. Richmond, “A Post-liberal Peace,” 572.

57. Mitchell and Richmond, “Towards a Post-liberal Peace,” 24.
58. Ramsbotham, “Radical Disagreement and Systemic Conflict Transformation.”
59. The everyday is qualified as a more authentic field of agency vis-à-vis forms of knowledge that
have been biased towards Western agendas. See Robins, “An Empirical Approach.” It has also
been referred to as the ‘authentic local’, ‘actual local’ or ‘real everyday’. Richmond, “Becoming
Liberal, Unbecoming Liberalism,” 328, 326.
60. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace,” 687.
61. By ‘normalisation’ is meant the process through which power that ‘constitutes the other side of
juridical and political structures of political representation’ is utilised to shape conduct within
society by affirming what is normal and what is not. See Foucault, ‘Society must be Defended’,
49. As normalisation functions to ‘make normal’ behaviour, it defines normal behaviour by
identifying abnormal behaviour that needs to be harmonised or removed. Taylor, “Normativity
and Normalization,” 52.
62. This process of normalisation implies the persistence of a particular form of power that
sustains and legitimises certain narratives, allowing them to become just as hegemonic as
the liberal peace has been in the past. While I do not have the space to elaborate on the type
of power that supports the local turn’s project of change, it is still possible to point to Michel
Foucault for a reflection that most narratives, in their attempt to subvert the hegemony of a
meta-narrative, are also expressing their own desire to become hegemonic by replacing the
orthodoxy. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 794.
63. Clark, “Hybridity, Holism, and Traditional Justice”; and Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making.”
64. Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, 81.
65. Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development, 80.
66. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace,” 687.
67. Richmond and Mac Ginty, “Where Now?,” 173.
68. Richmond and Mac Ginty, “Where Now?,” 184.
69. For a comprehensive overview of the relationship between anti-foundationalist perspectives
and the issue of space and agency, see Murdoch, Post-structuralist Geography. Post-structuralist,
in particular Foucauldian, scholars have been interested in the way in which spatialisation
of identities has permitted particular instruments of governmentality and discipline. See
Kingfisher, “Spatializing Neoliberalism.” Recent anti-foundationalist perspectives on peace
building have called for a neo-materialist approach to peace studies to reflect a sensitivity
to contingency and complexity, looking beyond the ‘dualistic categories that many peace-
building strategies are based on, such as inside/outside or global/local’. See Körppen, “Space
beyond the Liberal Peacebuilding Consensus,” 90; Wiuff Moe, “Relationality and Pragmatism
in Peacebuilding”; and Chadwick et al., Relational Sensibility.
70. Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, 153.
71. Shah, “The Failure of State Building,” 19.
72. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building,” 780.
73. Galvanek, Translating Peacebuilding Rationalities.
74. Chandler, Resilience, 78–79.
75. See, for instance, Sabaratnam, “IR in Dialogue.”
76. Peterson, “A Conceptual Unpacking of Hybridity.”
77. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace,” 670.
78. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace” (2011), 232; and Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,”
210.
79. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity.”
80. Visoka, “Three Levels of Hybridisation Practices.”
81. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity,” 506.
82. Mac Ginty and Sanghera, “Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development.”
83. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures.
84. Mitchell and Kelly, “Peaceful Spaces?”; and Watson, “Agency and the Everyday Activist.”
1366    E. Randazzo

85. 
Paffenholz, “Civil Society beyond the Liberal Peace,” 148; Shinko, “Agonistic Peace”; Richmond,
“Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace” (2011), 231; and Bargués-Pedreny, “Realising the Post-
modern Dream.”
86. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace” (2011), 232; and Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,”
210.
Murdoch, Post-structuralist Geography, 56.
87. 

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