Wednesday, I navigated the space of local peace building. I am still having a block identifying my role in peace building – but from this session I felt most interested in the topics discussed throughout the day, particularly on the issues of local peace building and the environment. Throughout my studies at MIIS I have been more vocal about my interest in bottom-up approaches, as well as work that advocates for attention and support in order to foster stronger community investment and self-worth, and as a balance to the dominance of overwhelming top-down power structures in which most of my previous experience has been exploring. When exploring local approaches to peace building, I was familiar with some of the reasoning and critiques, but felt a little uneasy that the challenges to promoting stronger bottom-up approaches to peace building (and by extension development) were still very dominated by top-down systems of power. There could be great projects and groups utilizing local knowledge and practice to address their community issues and be producing results, but due to state-led political donor cycles and constricting funding requirements often times the programs that are supported the most are the ones that either ignore or perpetuate the same cycle of violence (in its broader sense) against these communities. How do we go about changing that? How do we as peace builders address the root issue with our ability to practice in this field? Can you correct top-down systems with bottom-up approaches if the approaches are still rooted in top-down systems of knowledge and power? Those are probably discussions for another blog.

What I came away with though, and am still exploring this mindset but generally agree on its tenets, is that anyone has the potential to be a peace builder. A lot of the time when I tell my family or friends I am interested in conflict resolution or peace building studies, the field is raised to a higher standard or podium due to the nature of the work entailed and the causes, etc. We go to fancier than most institutions to get an expensive degree that connects us to a technical organization that has a monopoly on what conflict is defined as and how communities go about. They become “so proud of you” because they see the field you’re interested in as something that not every one can do, but every one needs.

But – as we pointed out in class – there have been societies before the peace building field was even established that had their own conflict resolution systems, that drew emphasis on the importance of local capacity and relationships between individuals and groups. There are people, all across the world, that have been working in peace building without formal degrees or institution approved technical jargon; that these people have been using the same exact practices and concepts that we learn in a class using different names. And yes, just because everyone has the capability to be a peace builder does not mean that everyone is one. But maybe also, in the cases and areas where peace building is already happening, showing the communities that what they’re doing is called “this” in the field would benefit them as well. Seeing that not only do they as individuals have what it takes to be a peace builder, but that their community has been engaging in this ‘field’ since as long as they’ve been around. There’s a lot of power in seeing yourself represented, and while the vocab might not be the same, seeing that the concepts behind the vocab are is tremendously powerful.