Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding How Community-Led Efforts of Maintaining Peace Can be Effective in Areas of Long-Term Armed Conflict

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project investigates the work required from civilian communities in building peace during prolonged armed conflict between state and non-state armed groups. It offers four important contributions: (1) Perspectives and ideas provided by this project will be useful to many civilian communities affected by armed conflicts around the world in implementing community-led peacebuilding strategies; (2) Analysis on community-led peacebuilding will be useful to international peacebuilding practitioners, government officials, and policy-makers in the US and globally in designing and implementing bottom-up peacebuilding projects; (3) Data on indigenous processes required in protecting civilian lives during war will be useful toward understanding indigenous peacebuilding, an emerging theme at the United Nations (UN); (4) Research methodology and instruments provided by this project will be useful to civilian communities, civil society organizations, and scholars in evaluating community-led peacebuilding projects. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. Given the limits of international peacebuilding interventions in sustaining peace in many places around the world, peace scholars and practitioners have focused on local peacebuilding practices in the last fifteen years. However, while this focus on local efforts in peacebuilding reveals the significance of practices and actors beyond the international level, most research remains focused on national actors and processes rather than grassroots peacebuilding practices. This project investigates one form of grassroots peacebuilding: the phenomenon of community-led peace zone. Through ethnographic methods of participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and archival research, this project examines (1) the daily work required from civilian communities in maintaining the peace zone; (2) the histories, values, and norms that the community draws upon to do so; and (3) the strategic relationships and interactions among civilians, state, non-state actors, and civil society organizations that allow communities to build and sustain peace. At stake in this project is a reconceptualization of peace beyond its dominant definition of the absence of violence, and peacebuilding as a state-led, expert-driven, and technical project of conflict resolution. Although this doctoral dissertation research project will focus on local peacebuilding in the Philippines, the research will provide new insights and approaches for maintaining peace at the local civilian level in areas with chronic armed conflict in many places, including localities in the United States.