Everyday peace: A strength-based community development approach to peacebuilding in conflict-affected contexts

This article proposes everyday peace as a strengths-based community development framework with significant ability to empower local peacebuilding agency. Most peacebuilding focusses on strengthening social cohesion, and thus starts by searching for common ground, bringing together those who can quickly move toward local negotiated outcomes. After serious intercommunal or sectarian violence, however, this may be neither safe nor possible. By contrast, “everyday peace” describes the methods by which ordinary people manage daily interactions in deeply divided societies, to sidestep or mitigate tensions and conflict triggers. Grounded in the everyday life of ordinary people, it is a broader concept recognizing the often-significant steps taken by people with restricted agency. This paper proposes that the principles are highly compatible, and community development is ideal for operationalizing everyday peace. Everyday peace thus offers a valuable framework for bottom-up peacebuilding, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and strengthening the agency of individuals in conflict-affected contexts.