The Rise of Resilience Peace-Making: Protest and Backlash Emma Van Santen

The word ‘resilience’ has featured in most international development policy documents for the past decade. As a recent Stockholm Peace Forum panel noted, resilience has now become a ‘fad’ within the peacebuilding community. This blog contributes to the debate about the relevance of resilience thinking for contemporary peace-making, drawing on some of my own research on Mali and San Salvador as well as chapters in the Rethinking Peace Mediation volume by Bristol University Press.

Resilience refers to the internal capacity of societies and individuals to adapt crises through self-organisation rather than the external provision of aid, resources or policy solutions. In the context of peacemaking the focus  on ‘local’  mediation has dovetailed neatly with longstanding critiques of traditional top-down liberal peace-making through institutional design, which note that the liberal peace has failed largely because it does not account for ‘different’ local cultural and political contexts. Peace defined as resilience has shifted the emphasis of international peace-making to the local community level, where dialogue that is inclusive of the cultural ‘difference’ between individual actors theoretically produces a sustainable resolution because it emerges from within conflict communities, rather than being externally imposed.

Resilience is viewed as an improvement on the securitisation of the violent consequences of neoliberalism because it recognises the role of non-state actors in community governance, allows for the connection between social exclusion and conflict and ensures local actors and communities participate in the process of social change. For example, in Mali, the International NGO Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD) supported the creation of a peace commission called Jam-e-Dina in 2017 that brought together traditional chiefs, religious leaders and other local notables. The aim of the committee was to address issues of local governance, humanitarian access and reducing harm to civilians. This mediation focused on ‘identity difference’ and aimed to achieve social inclusion by encouraging illiberal religious actors to engage with more liberal views.

Resilience, security and development programmes typically involve education, dialogue, livelihoods and skills programmes to equip marginalised actors to participate in formal structures. For example in the context of so-called ‘criminal’ governance, local mediation offers the opportunity to engage with organised criminal groups. For example in San Salvador the Organisation of American States (OAS) engaged informal communities in an urban gang truce process to address issues of socio-economic exclusion through community dialogue and skills training.

However, I argue that resilience based approaches rest on a relational view of power between individual actors within a bounded social community that exists separate to the sovereign state and the structures of international intervention. As a result, the capacity of the concept to promote state level political and economic transformation is limited. This is demonstrated in both the cases of Mali and of San Salvador. In Mali, the focus on religious dialogue excluded core issues of land insecurity and abuses by the security forces that had created alliances between the nomadic community and Islamist groups in the first place. This approach depoliticised the demands for social justice and disconnected them from the elite level internationally backed peace talks. As a result, a wave of protests erupted against the elite level Bamako Agreement which ultimately undermined the ‘peace’ that had been reached.  

In San Salvador public opinion turned against the social inclusion of gangs, forcing the government to withdraw support from the truce process.

The rise of ‘local’ peace-making to achieve community resilience has been a necessary response to the fragmentation and localisation of conflict that has accompanied the proliferation of unconventional violent non-state actors in modern conflicts. It has not only fostered dialogue to overcome identity difference, it has also allowed mediators to engage with unconventional violent non-state actors as governors of discrete ‘informal’ criminal economies. However, as the examples of Mali and San Salvador demonstrate, community mediation to promote local ‘resilience’ does not necessarily increase the social legitimacy of international peace-making interventions. Rather, resilience interventions are often undermined by the politics of social actors outside peace processes when it becomes clear that local initiatives cannot influence national outcomes.

The weakness of resilience approaches is that it attempts to achieve peace through the depoliticization of the conflict- poverty nexus and thereby fails to acknowledge and address the politics of inclusion and exclusion that drives conflict, violence and protest.

The emphasis of the resilience perspective on local communities will continue to be important for the peace-making profession. These examples illustrate the need to think about how resilience approaches can better engage with politics, rights, justice and the state in order to avoid being side-lined by the contentious politics of the global system.

Emma Van Santen holds a PhD from the Centre for Development Studies at Cambridge University. She has previously worked on climate change, humanitarian and peace-building policy for the Australian Agency for International Development/Department of Foreign Affairs. She consults broadly and is an accredited mediator specialising in land/environment disputes.