Globalization of Peace

Abstract

Conventional scholarship on peace and peacebuilding fail to consider how the capitalist world-system is implicated in the structural violence that fuels violent conflicts around the world. This helps to account for the widespread failures of state-led peacebuilding interventions. Although social movement and civil society actors are deemed critical to successful peacebuilding, they are typically denied meaningful roles in shaping these processes. Yet subaltern groups are critical agents pressing for attention to latent conflicts before they escalate into violent confrontations, and they work to reduce violent conflicts and their harmful effects on communities. By shifting our gaze from the realm of states and the interstate system, we see an array of forces working “from below” to articulate projects to transform social relations in ways that Oliver Richmond calls “peace formation.” Global human rights discourses have provided a unifying framework and focal point for these grassroots initiatives, which eschew mainstream notions of rights as formal protections for individuals while advancing new foundations for transformative peacebuilding based upon “people-centered human rights.”