A globalised practice of local peace agreements
Authors: Christine Bell, Laura Wise, Juline Beaujouan, Tim Epple, Robert Forster and Robert Wilson
This article argues that local peace agreements can be globalised in three main ways:
- Local agreements can be understood as a global practice of peacemaking taking place in differentiated context-specific localities.
- Local actors with transnational and even global ambitions are often involved.
- Practices of local agreement mediation are seeing increased recognition and involvement of international actors.
The difficulty of delimiting the precise sense in which agreements are ‘local’ points to an understanding of national conflict as itself operating as ‘a complex conflict system’ of intertwined local, national and often transnational or international conflicts. This reality needs a new political imaginary to support the resolution of intra-state conflict. The persistence of local peace processes to support, disrupt, or bypass and ‘exempt’ local communities from national conflict, points to both the need for this new political imaginary and its actualisation.
This article is published in the British Academy’s collection on Local Peace Processes, edited by Christine Bell, Jan Pospisil, and Laura Wise.
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