Local Peacemaking Trajectories and Hybrid Peace: Tracing Knowledge, Capacity and Agency in Conflict-driven Areas
Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the District of Aguablanca, Colombia using a range of qualitative research methods, this dissertation unpacks the way in which local knowledge, capacity and agency emerge, evolve and consolidate in operational forms of conflict navigation and coping mechanisms in conflict-driven areas. Furthermore, it suggests points of engagement between local and non-local actors where hybridization of local peace practice and knowledge occurs, focusing in the predominant relevance of endogenous knowledge and the agency of actors to subvert and present alternatives to liberal peace agents in hybridity. The central question is how does local knowledge emerge, evolve and hybridize in peace practice? and, how do local and non-local forms of knowing interact? Three conceptual frameworks are used interchangeably as lens for the analysis Everyday peace, \[local\] endogenous knowledge and hybrid peace. The findings highlight that everyday peace is a reactive mechanism to conflict, closely intertwined to the social manufacturing of the territory and knitted in rational assessments of risk associated to spatial dimensions of conflict. Thus, the leap from reactive to elaborated responses to conflict, occurs at a later stage when multi-level forms of grassroots and elite social organization appear as mechanisms for self-governance of the territory, driving other forms of collective action beyond the everyday. Findings also suggest that social forms of organization appear as the main conduct of information in the coalescence of endogenous and exogenous knowledge, where hybridization of the dynamics of response to conflict occur. However, hybridization remains situated and constrained by low trust, frictions between the top-down and bottom-up approaches, and the assumptions about local capacity made within the liberal paradigm. Diverging from notions in critical peacebuilding which advocate inquiring about the way in which locals attempt to restore social order in the aftermath of conflict, this dissertation proposes to re-historicize and reconstruct the way in which locals have accommodated social life to endure conflict, and the key composites of endogenous peacemaking knowledge. Understanding conflict navigation and local agency as constructed in non-linear trajectories is a critical input for attempts to create bottom-up peace agendas.