a. Quality/qualities of life from ‘within’

One of the most important facets of 20th century social and political theories of the everyday is their focus on the innate qualities of everyday practices, and how these contribute the quality of life for human beings by imbuing human life with special depth, meaning or worth. For instance, de Certeau contrasts the ‘tactics’ of the everyday – including walking, which creates and shapes spaces, and reading, which appropriates oral traditions and resists rational codification – as practices which only occur in the realm of ordinary people.Footnote ¹⁰ For Agnes Heller, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, engaging in the practices of everyday life leads to a special kind of knowledge, one concerned primarily with human needs and their fulfilment. This knowledge or, perhaps more aptly, ‘savoire faire’Footnote ¹¹ is derived not from training or conditioning, but rather from the experience of building, maintaining and interacting within a community. Such activities, these theorists argue, have a special quality due to their immediacy. Heller argues that the kinds of activities that people use to maintain and enjoy everyday life (such as talking, cooking, working and caring) are more likely to be non-instrumental and self-fulfilling than engaging with the more universalistic, instrumental, productive logics of science, administration and other systems that govern them.Footnote ¹² The qualities of these activities are attributed, in large part to their association with direct, lived experienceFootnote ¹³ or ‘unmediated’ praxis.Footnote ¹⁴ As such, Lefebvre contends, these practices resist the alienation or separation from lived experience often experienced in modern life by providing a direct link with the natural, biological or traditional life of communities.

The quality of ‘everyday’ activities, for these authors, also lies in its ability to generate plurality and richness in social life. For Heller, the everyday is a realm in which individuals may develop as rich, internally plural beings, conditioned by their interactions with the world and with others. She argues that these everyday interactions produce a plural form of personality which, in turn, gives rise to communities composed of unique and varied individuals.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition, Lefebvre, Heller and Dorothy SmithFootnote ¹⁶ all draw attention to a significant ‘other’ whose (sometimes sole) arena of action is the everyday: women, whose social status often allows them to find power and agency in the everyday. Thus, the everyday is viewed as the place where plurality and otherness is expressed immediately, unmediated and in all its variety.

Indeed, although it is often a source of boredom, repetition and inertia – the usual connotations of the terms ‘mundane’ or ‘quotidian’ – everyday life is also viewed as a wellspring of creativity. This is because, Heller and Lefebvre claim, the patterned repetition of everyday life is punctuated by moments of transcendence, catharsis or ‘play’.Footnote ¹⁷ Lefebvre's discussion of the role of the ‘festival’, a traditional but swiftly eroding aspect of everyday life, is useful in this regard. He describes festival as the ‘explosion of forces that had been slowly accumulated in and via everyday life’.Footnote ¹⁸ It is in these moments of collective creativity, he claims, that the regular rhythms of life can be sped up, slowed down, changed or transcended. Similarly, Heller advocates the transcendence of existing conditions from within everyday life; that is, her goal is not to leave this realm but rather to remake the various levels of the polity, including those that supervene upon it, by releasing its potential for radical change.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Vanegeim, it is only through massive changes in the patterns of everyday life that such changes could take place.Footnote ²⁰

Moreover, the qualitative distinctiveness of the everyday is aligned with a powerful idea of humanism centred around needs and their fulfilment – not only physical or biological, but also personal, spiritual or communal. The everyday is, importantly, framed as an immanent realm, or one that emanates from the lives of individuals and is self-constituting. As Charles Taylor argues, it may even eclipse the idea of transcendence or ‘higher’ realms.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, Taylor highlights the ethical basis of the everyday, ‘exclusive humanism’, as a uniquely modern understanding of the human condition. Heller's account of the individual in everyday provides a prime example of this. Everyday practices, she claims, should foster a dynamic in which all parties are able to fulfil aspects of the other's unique personality by means of their interaction.Footnote ²² Following Hegel and Lukacs, she claims that this allows individuals to transcend their own alienated status and connect with the species as a whole – whilst remaining firmly ensconced in the everyday.Footnote ²³ For Lefebvre, a similar outcome occurs when basic needs are realised as desires, which in turn may enable radical social change.Footnote ²⁴ The humanism of the everyday, then, is strongly conditioned by ideas of the individual personality and (collective or individual) agency and the meeting of experienced needs versus those generated by systems of production/consumption. A focus on everyday logics and practices is, therefore, expected to generate a form of human fulfilment that transcends mere ‘survival’Footnote ²⁵ and realises human potentiality in a fuller manner.

Within the literature on peace interventions, an emphasis on qualities and quality of life is associated with approaches to peace based on the idea of the ‘local’ or transformation ‘from below’. Such approaches focus on the perceived potential of ‘local’ actors to resist external control through practices that enhance the quality of life – for instance, ‘authentic’, fulfilling, nurturing or emancipatory approaches to peace. One such approach is found in the recent work of Oliver P. Richmond in this journal and elsewhere.Footnote ²⁶ This approach rejects the notion that the everyday is a model for peace, or that a ‘functioning’ everyday should be conflated with peace. Instead, it focuses on the potentialities of local agents to contest, reshape or resist within a local ‘space’. Here, ‘the local’ refers to a universal set of practices, rather than a reference to parochial, spatially, culturally or politically bounded places. This spatial element is crucial to his argument. Invoking Michel de Certeau, Richmond frames the everyday as a potential realm of critical practice, in which subjects may assert or attain agency by devising ‘tactics’ that may thwart the hegemonic and potentially oppressive ‘strategies’ of international actors.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, Richmond's account fuses the idea of locality with that of specific qualities of life (human agencies and the capacity to resist power) and the potential for a better quality of life (found in emancipatory forms of peace).

Elise Boulding's idea of ‘cultures of peace’ exemplifies a different application of this strand of thinking, from within the ‘practitioner’ literature in peace and conflict studies.Footnote ²⁸ Boulding argues that, in every society – including conflicting ones – there lie ‘hidden’ practices that are conducive to peace. Indeed, she seems to equate peace with the basic maintenance of everyday life. ‘Peaceableness’, she claims, inheres in the daily practices associated with family life (re)production, feeding, organising work, solving problems, meeting human needs and collective ‘play’ or creative activity which, she contends, compose the better part of daily life. For Boulding, peaceableness is ‘an action concept, involving the shaping and reshaping of understandings, situations and behaviours in a constantly changing lifeworld, to sustain well-being for all’.Footnote ²⁹ That is, peace is bound up with socialisation and the physical enactment of practices associated with caring, interpersonal exchange and social formation, including that of identity-based or ‘communal’ groups on a small scale. She also emphasises the importance of the ‘local’ in creating peace, but lends it the specific connotations of the small scale, face-to-face interactions and traditional or ‘culturally’ based modes of activity.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, although the issues of resistance and agency raised by Richmond are not prominent here (nor is the impact of external interveners), Boulding suggests that a certain kind of agency arises or emerges from ‘associative richness’ and, in particular, moments of collective creativity, such as communal festivals or the caring relationships formed within families and kinship groups.Footnote ³¹ In short, Boulding's approach equates local activities – often associated with caring, communication and social interaction – with a better quality of peace.

These ideas are echoed in the recent work of John Paul Lederach, who relies heavily on his assumptions about the everyday to formulate a ‘transcendent’ model of conflict transformation. Lederach invokes the idea of ‘ordinary language’ and ‘everyday understandings’ as a basis for altering the dynamics of conflict.Footnote ³² He associates the alteration of personal beliefs and attitudes as a form of ‘craftsmanship’, or collective work, which fosters creativity or ‘moral imagination’.Footnote ³³ Importantly, apparently transcendent moments of creative problem solving are to arise from the physical, embodied, practiced elements of dialogue and interaction.Footnote ³⁴ For Lederach, the use of such activities to bring about change helps to close what he calls the ‘authenticity gap’ – that is, the gap between the goals associated with peace and the realities of the lives of conflicting actors. For Lederach, ‘to be authentic, social change must be broadly structural but it is tested by the minutia and immediacy of people's behavior’.Footnote ³⁵ In other words, peace is behavioural, and, what's more, it is linked to and dependent upon the behaviours that take place in everyday life and their capacity to imbue the human experience with transcendent qualities.

As this discussion has suggested, there is a powerful strand of thought regarding the everyday which associates it with local/internal or small-scale activities that embody unique qualities and enhance the overall quality of collective life. This idea is reflected in the ‘everyday’ approaches to peacebuilding discussed above, which view the everyday as a space of resistance, agency, transcendence and the enhancement of life. In other words, they promote a normatively positive assessment of peacebuilding techniques that harness the qualities of life emerging from local groups to create a better quality of peace and everyday life after violence.

b. Control of life from ‘without’

Within social and political theories of the everyday, the emphasis on quality or qualities of life is not clear-cut. On the contrary, the authors discussed earlier highlight the deep ambiguity of everyday life and the tension between its qualities and its vulnerability to control and alienation. Within the same set of discourses, the everyday is simultaneously framed as a site for domination and control by means of the exertion of power, whether subtle or openly coercive.

The everyday, as theorised earlier, is a vast, variegated and porous realm, whose ragged edges are subject to constant rending and mending. According to Lefebvre, Heller and others, it is also the underlying basis of the entire polity and all of its levels.Footnote ³⁶ As such, it may become the site of alienation, penetration, discipline and control. One of the most poignant warnings issued by the authors aboveFootnote ³⁷ is that everyday life may become instrumentalised to the logics of production and consumption, or other norms of modernity. A range of logics or overarching ‘strategies’ of powerFootnote ³⁸ – including the quantification or objectification of human beings,Footnote ³⁹ privatisationFootnote ⁴⁰ and the atomisation of individuals,Footnote ⁴¹ dynamics of self-regulation, production and the radicalisation of symbols or communicative praxisFootnote ⁴² – may be extended into the realm of the everyday, often by means of modernising processes.Footnote ⁴³ In this manner, the logics of modern production, consumption and regulation are able to penetrate the realm of the everyday and transform its practices such that they feed and generate the aforementioned processes.Footnote ⁴⁴ This concern resonates with the Foucaultian idea of governmentality, which harnesses existing social practice as a set of conduits and techniques for administering powerFootnote ⁴⁵ – and which is the basis of the paradigm known as governance, central to mainstream peacebuilding projects. Indeed, as post-Foucaultian theorists point out, the penetration of the basic elements of daily life – survival, hygiene, social structure, and behaviour, for instance – is one of the bases of bio-political control.Footnote ⁴⁶ These strategies of governance may be used to create a form of ‘pastoral’ power which shapes communities through the meeting of their basic physical and social needs, and often occurs through the shaping and subjectification of the individual through his or her encounters with the systems used to produce and satisfy needs.Footnote ⁴⁷ This process of penetration may be a force for the colonisation and domination of the everyday;Footnote ⁴⁸ however, since it meets many needs and improves, on some registers, the lives of a large number of individuals, it may be perceived by them as a form of freedom, emancipation or the realisation of latent potential.Footnote ⁴⁹ This has important implications when applied to peace: given the strong normative connotations of the concept, any form of peace, no matter how constraining, may be perceived as a form of freedom from violence.

These dynamics of penetration, the cultivation of dynamics and the (re)shaping of needs may contribute to a powerful form of alienation in which human needs and potentialities are determined at a ‘level’ far removed from that of individuals and communities, and in accordance with its logic. Indeed, as Lefebvre and Smith both argue, the hierarchical nature of the productive process may result in the stratification of the polity and, as these levels ascend, the allocation of power to the highest levels. As these levels are formed and abstracted, they tend to simplify human activity by homogenising it into a set of uniform codes, symbols or processes,Footnote ⁵⁰ removing its subtler nuances and complexity. Furthermore, as Lefebvre argues, the processes in which these logics unfold are designed to repel or absorb disruptions that may extrude from non-penetrated spaces; the process of ‘recuperation’ may, in fact, strengthen the institutions or logics of power. Indeed, this is the dilemma posed by a number of post-structuralist theorists, remarkably Deleuze and GuattariFootnote ⁵¹ and Foucault:Footnote ⁵² to resist a machine is to fuel its productive processes and to provide material upon which it can work. In turn, these dynamics may lead, perhaps ironically, to the alienation of power from the realm of everyday life. Alienation, in this context, involves the removal of agency in the face of power and, as a result, the formation of a major disjunction between the needs defined and produced by the strategies of power and those emerging from the immediate, local experience of individuals and groups.Footnote ⁵³

Another, perhaps less popular critique of the everyday comes from theorists such as Taylor and VanegeimFootnote ⁵⁴ who are concerned that the cultivation of everyday life may result in the impoverishment of the human condition. Their image of the everyday is the inverse of the ‘quality of life’ argument discussed above. From Vaneigem's perspective, a concern with the problems of everyday life may lead to an obsession with survival, or the avoidance of death, even if the latter involves flattening life into a meaningless process of production and consumption. Taylor, in a less extreme formulation, is concerned that the horizon of total immanence, ‘exclusive humanism’ and the loss of transcendent moralities may result in the attrition of traditions and values that enrich human life, and the preclusion of the aspirational quality that sparks human ingenuity.Footnote ⁵⁵ He relates this directly to the problem of violence, arguing that the goal of ending violence related to transcendent goals may result in more life, or more orderly life, but it may also deprive groups and individuals of the unique factors, traditions or sources that constitute them.Footnote ⁵⁶

Drawing on this strand of thinking, an alternative discourse on the everyday within peace and conflict studies that engages more or less directly with the everyday, focuses on its vulnerability to control and manipulation by powerful, external actors. This literature often draws upon post-structuralist and especially Foucaultian critiques of liberal peacebuilding which have emerged in recent years. Vivienne Jabri,Footnote ⁵⁷ for instance, argues that war involves the extension and exertion of power throughout the levels of the polity and international sphere, rooted in societal structures and patterns. However, she claims, the discourses and policy frameworks of peacebuilding operate in similar ways to impose ‘Western’ or Western-modern knowledge systems on what they construct as non-Western societies characterised by lack. In this manner, she argues, the violent subjugation of other societies has been supplanted by the universalising practices of intervention.Footnote ⁵⁸ Tracing these interventions from Kant's perpetual peace thesis, she argues that ‘if democratic societies eschew war through the pacifying mechanisms of a democratically ratified law, then war must somehow be relocated at the limits of democratic space and, if such space expands through institutionalised, law-governed relations between states, then peace acquires a universal, perpetual character’.Footnote ⁵⁹ From this perspective, it is the exclusion of violence and conflict that creates a space of peace purged of conflict. This, she claims, is a juridical understanding of peace in which the Kantian notion of a civic peace is expanded to the international level and used as a means for regulating violence at the level of everyday interactions, or the dialectics in which peace and conflict are played out. Her concern is that the agency or capacity to ‘legislate for peace’ be grounded in Habermasian discourse ethics and a transformative, cosmopolitan form of democracy rather than the exertion of bare force.Footnote ⁶⁰ Here, the everyday world of discursive interaction is presented as one which could, potentially, reshape and determine the ‘legislation’ of peace, but which most powerful actors persist in dominating. From a different perspective, David ChandlerFootnote ⁶¹ claims that peacebuilding interventions (increasingly conflated with state-building) tend to convert the traditional sovereignty asserted by the Westphalian nation-state into the dispersed and complex processes of ‘self-government’. As peace interventions become more closely aligned with the creation and implementation of good governance, an administrative logic, and the meta-narratives of international actors tend to depoliticise the project of peace and reduce it to a problem of management.Footnote ⁶² Through the use of strategies such as ‘partnerships’ formed between international and local actors, he claims, the former combine ‘domination and denial’ in a forceful way.Footnote ⁶³ On the whole, this leads to a form of peacebuilding in which the priorities of governance usurp contestation and politics.

In a related sense, Mark DuffieldFootnote ⁶⁴ examines the use of the development and security agendas that underpin contemporary peace interventions to exert bio-political control over the social, economic and biological aspects of human existence and, ultimately, to control ‘surplus life’.Footnote ⁶⁵ From this perspective, peace is measured largely by what I shall call the ‘quantity of life’ – that is, the extent to which peace interventions can guarantee the social, biological and economic survival of citizens in a particular area. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that attend to needs defined in these fields help to extend the power of international actors which, Duffield argues, have their roots in colonial discourses and strategies.Footnote ⁶⁶ This approach to peace creates a ‘permanent emergency’ in which ‘surplus life is a potentially dangerous life in need of constant rescue and reintegration’ into and by means of the processes associated with peacebuilding, which ultimately constructs war as an unending process.Footnote ⁶⁷

I have illustrated how two very different orientations towards the everyday have developed within the study and design of international peace interventions. Each reproduces (whether or not explicitly) one of the main facets of the everyday discussed here, in large part attributing the ‘quality’ dimension to ‘local’ actors and the ‘control’ aspect to ‘international’ actors. However, by grounding these discourses within the same tradition of thinking about the everyday, I have demonstrated the deep ambiguity of the everyday: these two approaches are, in fact, not alternative visions of the everyday, but rather two dimensions of the same dynamic of quality/control, in which all actors are ensconced. Now, I shall illustrate the complexity of this dynamic by subverting the local/international framework and challenging several core assumptions about the role of the everyday in international peace interventions.

a. Quality as control: affective peacebuilding

A concern with the quality or qualities of everyday life is not peculiar to ‘local’ actors. Indeed, mainstream peace interventions are very much concerned with cultivating these qualities. ‘Positive peace’ and conflict transformation approaches in particular aim to deliver peace through a powerful medium: affect, or the psychological, emotional and experiential elements of everyday life. More specifically, they conceptualise peace in terms of affective concepts such as wellness, therapy, flourishing, fulfilment or even emancipation, and they frame peace as an object of desire, aspiration and fulfilment or the realisation of higher modes of being. This mode of ‘affective peacebuilding’ differs from the bio-political analyses discussed above. Whereas the latter are concerned more with the regulation and manipulation of the quantity of life and death, and the control of its dynamics, the affective dimension of peacebuilding directly targets the qualitative aspects of everyday life. To appreciate this, it is instructive to glance briefly at the discourses surrounding ‘positive peace’ and the closely-related strategy of conflict transformation.

Within these fields, bio-political and bio-affective strategies are deeply entwined. For instance, Galtung's seminal Peace by Peaceful Means promotes a strategy of ‘diagnosis, prognosis therapy’ in response to violence, not only to ‘cure’ violence, but also to prevent relapse.Footnote ⁶⁸ From his perspective, the relationship between those affected by violence and those who would create peace is akin to a ‘patient-healer relation’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Both Galtung and Boulding call for the deeper involvement of women in conflict transformation, as they are viewed as ‘nurturer-leaders’ or believed to have been socialised into nurturing roles which promote peacefulness,Footnote ⁷⁰ whilst Louis Kriesberg avers that empathy is a necessary element of creating peace.Footnote ⁷¹ Similarly, Lederach uses metaphors of health and wellness to describe the conditions of ‘sustainable’ peace; he claims that this state of affairs is ‘like the immune system in the body or a healthy ecosystem in the environment’.Footnote ⁷² For him, the goal is to create ‘healthy, generative social interaction’.Footnote ⁷³ Likewise, Boulding is concerned with promoting and channelling the caring impulses of individuals and groups, based on their ‘deepest feelings of doing right’ and ‘a passionate concern for the welfare of human beings’.Footnote ⁷⁴

These images of health, well-being and nurturance are related to bio-political strategies of controlling bodies, life processes and ‘excess life’,Footnote ⁷⁵ but they also contain an ideal of health and wellness that focuses on quality of life, experiential elements and even morality. Rather than privileging biological health, they promote a form of human flourishing or even ‘exclusive humanism’Footnote ⁷⁶ (see further on) that conflates the ideals if humanism with the steady growth and stability of everyday life. Hugh Miall, for instance, directly relates ‘positive peace’ to the goal of promoting ‘human flourishing’, which is tied to the self-realisation of human beings rather than their mere survival.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, the goal of realising the potentialities of human beings and providing them with a sense of deeper fulfilment is a goal of many influential authors in this field. From this perspective, fulfilment involves not only social harmony, economic prosperity, or individual betterment, but also the ability for ‘human beings to develop and use to the full their capacities for creativity, service and enjoyment’Footnote ⁷⁸ and to engage in ‘moral growth’ which may ultimately ‘humanise’ them by providing ‘a genuinely good form of human conduct’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The concepts of ‘positive peace’ discussed here are not concerned with ‘bare life’ or ‘survival’,Footnote ⁸⁰ so much as with cultivating and altering the quality of life by means of the specific qualities of the everyday – including caring, communication and interaction. In elevating everyday practices into sources of fulfilment and moral improvement, they highlight an important aspect of transformative peace interventions: the cultivation and the potential manipulation of affect.

Affect as a strategy of peacebuilding involves the attempt to enhance the quality or qualities of life emotional, aspirational and even transcendent elements of life. For some authors in the field, the alteration of violent patterns of behaviour is strongly associated with ‘affect control’ and the creation of cultures of conflict management that ultimately become the ‘emotional basis of the community’.Footnote ⁸¹ From this perspective, peaceful activity and interactions are promoted through the ‘impact of feeling’ and the ‘passion’ or depth of feeling with which people pursue peace.Footnote ⁸² The ‘authenticity’ of this feeling is believed to be crucial. For Howard Adelman, peace arises through ‘the cultivation of an inner authentic spirituality independent of external norms and influences’.Footnote ⁸³ In a similar manner, Lederach claims that creating peace requires bridging an ‘authenticity gap’, which involves genuine, lived experience and the use of ‘moral imagination’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Authenticity, in this context, refers not only to the veracity or local resonance of a certain strategy of peacebuilding, but also to the extent to which people experience it as enriching, fulfilling or emancipatory.

Indeed, the ideal of emancipation is an important aspect of the affective dimension of transformative peace interventions or ‘positive peace’ strategies.Footnote ⁸⁵ For Galtung, emancipation takes place at an individual and societal level, and involves ‘conscientisation’, or ‘the dialectic of liberating oneself from the old Self while at the same time creating the new self’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Within this vein, many authors in this field adopt a utopian approach to the idea of peace, or one which frames conflict transformation as the active attempt to transcend existing conditions and imagine or visualise new ones. For Jabri, peace is a normative construct which both identifies violence in existing conditions and contains an emancipatory component aimed at altering them.Footnote ⁸⁷ Likewise, for Lederach, an active, collective ‘moral imagination’ is necessary to overcome the ‘pervading ethos of pessimism’Footnote ⁸⁸ that he believes to accompany violence, and to ‘transcend what has been and is now, while still living in it’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Similarly, for Boulding, ‘the very ability to imagine something different and better than what currently exists is critical for the possibility of social change’.Footnote ⁹⁰ This emancipatory or utopian strand in thinking about ‘positive peace’ and conflict transformation bears an important relationship to affect. It is premised on the existence – or, in most cases, the cultivation – of a strong desire or longing for peace.Footnote ⁹¹ More specifically, the ideals of wellness, human flourishing, fulfilment, emancipation and utopianism frame peace as an object of desire and aspiration. Peace, from this perspective, is simultaneously the harmonious unfolding of mundane everyday life and an ideal to be constantly striven for.

The use of affect as a strategy of peacebuilding is particularly apparent in the interventions of international organisations that promote ‘positive peace’ or transformative approaches to peace, security and development. Here, I shall briefly examine how this approach has shaped peace interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). Due to its particularly brutal and pervasive, socially-embedded forms, violence in BiH and the Balkan region in general is often framed in international discourses as pathological, a deviation from ‘universalisable normal life’,Footnote ⁹² or as a moral problem to be corrected through international interventions, or as an inherent weakness in or incapacitation of society or the state.Footnote ⁹³ In addition to the perceived social or moral pathologies embedded within society, there is a strong assumption that poverty or poor standards of living are important causes of ongoing hostility.Footnote ⁹⁴ To address these perceived symptoms or syndromes, international actors have focused their efforts on several therapeutic strategies that focus not only on raw economic growth, but more directly on personal, moral and social development related to the quality of everyday life and its experience. Amongst these therapies is the strategy of development in alignment with EU and UN standards of development and stability, such as the UN's Millennium Development GoalsFootnote ⁹⁵ and the EU's Stability and Association Process, which related to standards, procedures and institutions within the political system and bureaucracy.Footnote ⁹⁶ Many of the strategies used to achieve these goals involved the cultivation of personal skills and collective self-development or improvement. For instance, UN and EU interventions sought to enhance ‘human capital’ and prevent a ‘brain drain’ by reforming education, micro-credit and opportunities for employment training.Footnote ⁹⁷ Crucially, many of these initiatives involved projects designed to promote democratic or ‘European’ values, including those of human rights and participative democracy.Footnote ⁹⁸ Indeed, such educative programmes, whether delivered formally in schools or through NGOs, were tasked with ‘teaching people how to behave and know right from wrong’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In addition, these international actors provided direct therapies such as trauma counselling and projects intended to promote ‘reconciliation, measured by inter-ethnic collaboration on [the] implementation [of projects]’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and to ‘overcome ethnic nationalism’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In order to achieve the latter, those involved in the initiatives in question were expected to learn and practice behaviours that promoted tolerance, empathy and even care for others. As such, these initiatives acted as therapies for both of the perceived ills discussed above: impoverishment and moral or ethical lack. Crucially, the international actors promoting them framed themselves as providers of care or healing, or catalysts for the personal, moral and socio-economic growth of BiH, and thus as a source for the cultivation of an improved quality of life.

International interventions based on social and economic development also entailed a strong emancipatory element based on the powerful normative image of modernisation and ‘prosperity’.Footnote ¹⁰² As Vanessa Pupavac claims, the image of a strong, healthy, modern society and economy was often contrasted with a romanticised ‘pastoral’ image of BiH based on rural agriculture and craft, despite the country's recent history of heavy industry during the Communist period and continuing to the present time.Footnote ¹⁰³ Perhaps ironically, this approach mirrors the well-documented negative attitudes of city-dwellers towards their rural counterparts that was prevalent during the warFootnote ¹⁰⁴ and is still reflected in the discourse of many urban young people today. For instance, one respondent in my recent study of ‘international life’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina criticised her hometown of Mostar – and international actors involved in its reconstruction – for failing to attain this ideal: ‘the city's not an urban community anymore. It doesn't provide me with an idea of a city that I think a city should be. It doesn't provide my friends – it doesn't provide anyone who has a more cosmopolitan view of life’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Another respondent, also working in Mostar, commented that ‘we want to see reconstructed buildings in Mostar. We want to see these, you know, clean grass parks, theatres and this and that as all normal, European citizens here’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This second quote suggests that, in fact, the aspiration towards a perceived ideal of European values is in fact an aspiration towards the attainment of mundane aspects of everyday life – yet another ambiguity in which the powerful affective appeal of peacebuilding is embedded.

In a more negative sense, Chandler argues that the modernising strategies of international actors in BiH were contrasted with the image of the uneducated peasant, a ‘lack of democratic values’, or poor decision-making shaped by trauma.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ According to Michael Pugh, BiH was generally perceived by international actors as ‘un-modern’ in that individuals ‘have not been freed from collective constraints, social norms or society itself’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, he claims, ‘the people of BiH and accused of resisting the modern condition, clinging to primordial identities, political clientism and forms of economic exchange that brought them into contention with globalisation and structural adjustment, as well as with each other’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ International interventions designed to modernise the economy and society, and to dissolve these obstacles, were thus expected to free BiH from the perceived shackles of underdevelopment. In this sense, the ‘therapies’ of modernisation, education and reform discussed above were associated with ‘emancipating’ BiH from perceived conditions of backwardness and lack, and the idea of modernising development was framed as an object of aspiration and desire.

The element of desire is crucial. In order to achieve the goals of modernisation and peacebuilding, the international actors in question needed to generate sufficient desire for the kind of peace they offered. To achieve this, they created a powerful object of desire: the EU, and the normative-affective images it engendered. Membership in the EU is generally treated as a ‘carrot’, or a ‘pot of gold’Footnote ¹¹⁰ – in other words, a rationalistic inducement to comply with international standards based on economic or political incentives.Footnote ¹¹¹ Yet in the case of peace interventions in BiH, the EU symbolised much more: as Mary Kaldor argues, for many actors (both ‘local’ and ‘international’), the term ‘Europe’ had ‘an almost mystical significance’ and was the primary ‘outlook to which those who opposed nationalism aspired’Footnote ¹¹² and it functioned as ‘a symbol for a new type of humanitarian reconstruction, and a symbol of a new Europeanism or internationalism’.Footnote ¹¹³ Indeed, EU documents evoke powerful images of a ‘European future, marked by increased stability and prosperity’Footnote ¹¹⁴ for BiH and, according to the UNDP, ‘BiH's journey to Europe amounts to more than a set of technical and legalistic processes [… it] is fundamentally about renewal and unity.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In a related sense, World Bank documents suggest that the ‘negative feelings’ engendered by war were to be replaced with a new optimism grounded in the goal of EU accession and overall development ‘in order to allow all residents of BiH to hope that tomorrow will be better and that tomorrow will soon come’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ These comments reflect the manner in which international actors employed images of optimism, transcendence, and a more caring, prosperous future in order to generate popular desire for the strategies of peace intervention they promoted. In addition, they constructed powerful objects of desire to visually symbolise the goals in question, including the bridge built across divided Mostar. According to Sumantra Bose, the then High Representative Paddy Ashdown called the bridge a ‘cornerstone of Bosnia's reconstruction as a multi-ethnic society and a symbol of bridging the gap between communities’Footnote ¹¹⁷ to much international fanfare. Perhaps tellingly, upon the construction of this bridge, ‘local Bosniacs poured scorn on the international obsession with the bridge's wider meaning’ and still, one respondent claimed, he knows several individuals who have ‘never crossed the bridge’ in defiance of its attempt to unify the city.Footnote ¹¹⁸At any rate, international actors construct visible objects of desire, including the bridge in Mostar, the luxurious, modernistic headquarters of international organisations and the imposing new parliament and governmental buildings of Sarajevo (surrounded, still, by pitted and bullet-ridden buildings) as means for generating desire for a promised future.

The desire for a particular model of peace, development and security, in this case, is a powerful form of control. Each of the objects of aspiration and desire discussed earlier – whether a ‘healthy’, prosperous economy and society, or the normative ideals of the EU – was used to mobilise citizens of BiH around particular strategies of peacebuilding. In particular, the ‘mystical’ promise of EU membership was instrumentalised to place pressure upon Bosnian politicians to adhere to EU regulations, and particularly to the demands of the SAP. Indeed, as peace interventions in BiH began to hit difficulties in the early 2000s, the EU issued vague threats to put these objects of desire further from reach if BiH did not comply with its regulations.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As such, the generation and mobilisation of desire and longing (whether for prosperity, fulfilment, modernisation or emancipation) had an important function in ensuring adherence to a particular mode of peace and polity-building.

This brief discussion suggests that even peace interventions realised primarily through strategies of development are not strictly bio-political; they are also affective, or driven by the cultivation, alteration and manipulation of the quality and qualities of everyday life and its affective dimensions. This challenges two of the assumptions about the everyday discussed above. First, it suggests that the impulse to create a peace based on the quality of life by means of the unique qualities of everyday practice is not necessarily the sole preserve of ‘local’ actors. It may also be a deliberate strategy employed by ‘international’ actors to create particular models of peace. Secondly, and in relation to the latter point, the cultivation of affective phenomena – whether the ideal of therapy and wellness, aspirations toward self-fulfilment or the desire for emancipation – are not always positive or desirable when used instrumentally in this manner.

This problem has been commented upon by several contemporary philosophers, including Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their books Multitude and Empire, they claim that power in the contemporary world order is realised largely through the control of ‘immaterial labour’Footnote ¹²⁰ or the use of ‘moral instruments’Footnote ¹²¹ to direct and control human life. According to them, the products of ‘affective labour’ include ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion, and thus they conflate the subject of affective labour with its product – the feeling or experience of these affects.Footnote ¹²² They draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Footnote ¹²³ who argued that power in the contemporary era is based largely on the creation of ‘machines’ or social processes that ‘inscribe’ human life with certain patterns. ‘Desiring-machines’, they claim, are not driven by genuine human needs, but rather create needs and then produce the desire to fulfil them.Footnote ¹²⁴ In the field of peace and conflict studies, several authors have commented on the fact that international peace interventions are concerned more with their own normative and practical models of peace than with meeting the everyday needs facing individuals in contexts of violence.Footnote ¹²⁵ Here, I have suggested that this dynamic is not simply one of ignorance or a gap between perceptions. Peace interventions may, in some cases, constitute Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘desiring machines’ which generate a need for particular models of peace rather than attempting to identify and address existing needs within everyday life (although the two may sometimes overlap). Another line of criticism can be found in the work of Charles Taylor, whose investigation of the ‘ethics of authenticity’ raises several concerns with regards to the ramifications of such strategies. Taylor suggests that the ‘powerful moral ideal’ behind modernisation privileges individual self-fulfilmentFootnote ¹²⁶ and, simultaneously, flattens human life by collapsing transcendent ideals into matters of mundane everyday life or ‘human flourishing’.Footnote ¹²⁷ This, he claims, may contribute to the dissolution of valuable social structures through the ‘atomisation’ of society, and the loss of the experience of transcendence, which he views as an ‘essential human fulfillment’.Footnote ¹²⁸ These analyses suggest that no matter how normatively desirable the strategies in question or their ‘products’ might seem, the external manipulation of affect may ultimately be used as a form of control over the (re)production of society, and may ultimately dilute or damage it.

Finally, the cultivation of quality or qualities of life as a means for affective strategies may have perverse effects. According to several members of international organisations that I interviewed in BiH in the spring of 2010 (fifteen years since the Dayton Peace Accords), this attempt to use promises and what I have referred to as the cultivation of affect to encourage participation in and adherence to strategies of peacebuilding may have backfired. Several respondents suggested that since 2006, a sense of disappointment and despondency has become widespread since the institutional, social and economic changes promised by peacebuilding actors have not materialised, and EU membership still seems to be a long way off.Footnote ¹²⁹ As a result, it was suggested, many citizens of BiH have not only become wary and mistrustful of the peace interventions, but in fact disaffected by the contrast between the aspirations generated by peace interventions and the reality they face. For instance, one respondent suggested that ‘the ordinary people would call international organizations “fog sellers” […] justifying their large salaries and their large budgets at the expense of the country’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Therefore, the cultivation of the quality or qualities of life as a means for gaining affective control, may be a risky strategy in the long-term.

b. Control as quality: threatworks and the control of violence

The discussions above suggested that control in the realm of the everyday tends to be perceived as a dynamic of power that originates from outside the context of a peace intervention, usually from external or international actors. It also suggests that the normative orientation towards control as a mode of peacebuilding is, on the whole, negative, or at least very cautious. Here, I shall argue that control might be integral to the quality of life of the actors in question and, moreover, that control need not emanate ‘from above’ or even from relatively powerful actors. Rather, it may occur at a local level and in the medium of conflictual forms of world-building, or what I have elsewhere called ‘threatworks’.Footnote ¹³¹

‘Threatworks’ are the sets of practices, institutions or customs through which people exchange, acknowledge, evade, manoeuvre, contest and otherwise resist threats to their collective existence. Elements of a threatwork may include, for example, physical objects, such as barriers, gates and walls; social practices such as (‘voluntary’) segregation, ostracisation or reticence around members of a different groups; or cultural markers such as symbols, flags, the use of non-mainstream languages and other tactics for promoting or preserving a particular way of life. Each threatwork is potentially unique; even within local neighbourhoods or regions affected by the same broad dynamics of threat, different practices and activities are used to temper and resist it. These practices tend to comprise or be associated with events (such as sporting events, traditional holidays or celebrations, or parades) or habits (such as living amongst one's own co-ethnics, wearing clothing of symbolic colour, or using words or slang that mark one as a member of a specific ethnic group) that are crucial to the preservation and enjoyment of the kind of life envisioned by each respective group.

In any polity in which plural worlds coexist, the acts through which they are built, preserved and altered frequently collide with those of other groups and create radical threats. The threats raised by this form of pluralisation may be reacted to with hostility or even aggression, but it may also be greeted by responses ranging from simple tolerationFootnote ¹³² to active engagement. Some of these responses may be undesirable and reactionary, whilst others may be creative and progressive, but all constitute means of responding to, resisting and coping with threat. Where plural worlds are perceived by their inhabitants to be relatively balanced and stable (if not strictly equal) in terms of their power, influence or degree of security; where they may overlap without threatening damage or destruction, and where people may move between them with relative ease, threatworks are less pronounced. However, where there is a perceived imbalance of threat – that is, where one world or form of world-building appears likely to breach, compromise or even obliterate another – threatworks may be more visible, tangible and play a bigger role in everyday life. The contexts generally defined as ‘conflict zones’ or ‘societies in conflict’ are those in which conflictual forms of world-building are significant or even predominant within everyday life.

Threatworks bear an important relationship to violence: they resist, shape and control the threat of violence, and the realisation of such threats. More specifically, conflictual forms of world-building are often used to prevent cycles of violence. Although they bear a causal relationship to cycles of violence, the direction of causation is not that which theorists of conflict tend to assume. In short, threatworks or conflictual forms of world-building respond to, and attempt to resist, the threat of violence; they do not cause violence, nor do they escalate into violence if left unaltered. In fact, I have argued, the reason why a high incidence of threatworks tend to correlate with cycles of violence is that the threatworks in question emerged in response to a particularly intense or imminent threat of violence, and attempted to resist it. In fact, the cycles of violence in question occurred when and where these threatworks were breached or destroyed. In other words, violence does not arise from conflict, but rather from the impossibility of conflicting.

In the context of Northern Ireland, threatworks have been an important means of exerting control and, in so doing, preventing violence and increasing the quality of life throughout periods of intense threat. In the 1960s, before the most violent cycles of the Troubles began, a range of social practices were used to defuse, suppress or dissipate the threats exchanged between conflicting groups differentiated by class, ethnicity or political orientation. These involved the informal segregation of groups within physical communities and at public events, the relegation of sectarian references to the private realm and the toleration (if not acceptance) of members of conflicting groups. In most cases, these practices arose in cultural events such as sports days or in the traditional organisation of social and family life, all of which were constitutive of the groups in question and perceived to be crucial to their existence and survival as a community. The formation and maintenance of threatworks such as this, allowed a long standing conflict between these groups to be embodied in such a way that the threats exchanged between them were not experienced as ‘irresistible’ (or uncontrollable) by any particular group. As a result, conflict took place, but in relatively non-violent (if not peaceful) ways. This dynamic changed dramatically in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when large-scale changes in social, economic and political organisation rapidly altered the patterns of everyday life. This, in turn, damaged established threatworks and directly intensified the fear of eradication experienced by a range of groups (including Republicans, hard-line unionists and the Unionist state). It was in this context – in which threatworks were rapidly threatened or destroyed, and conflictual forms of world-building were no longer sufficient to respond to the threat of eradication – that the cycle of violence known as the Troubles emerged.Footnote ¹³³

In contemporary Belfast, complex threatworks are used to control the threats raised by (at least two) dynamics: continuing frictions between groups, in particular paramilitary-affiliated organisations; and the massive changes brought about by the ‘peace process’. Currently, these threatworks include frequent rioting (often amongst young people), the display of paramilitary or sectarian flags or symbols, aggressive or destructive behaviour at parades, memorials and civic events and the erection of social or physical barriers occupy much the same role.Footnote ¹³⁴ As anthropological and historical literature illustrates,Footnote ¹³⁵ these activities have historically been used as means for channelling, managing or at least responding to the threat of violence, sometimes for centuries.

Crucially, threatworks help to sustain periods of relative peace by engaging directly with (and in) various forms of conflict. Indeed, many of the phenomena in which threatworks are embodied are crucial to the inclusion, well-being and social, cultural or economic integrity of the polity and the groups within it, even if they involve unevenness or exclusion, which may be an affront to the norms of peacebuilding actors. As such, they are not simply local versions of ‘negative peace’, but may instead constitute competing – or even conflicting – visions of positive peace developed by each group or community in accordance to its orientation to or place in the conflict. In, the destruction of threatworks through international interventions such as peacebuilding may in fact constitute a powerful form of violence – ‘radical violence’ or the destruction of the roots of conflicting groups.Footnote ¹³⁶

The idea – and practical manifestations – of threatworks raise a challenge to each of the dimensions discussed above. First, the analysis of threatworks suggests that local/internal actors are not engaged only (or even primarily) in activities oriented specifically to enhancing the quality of life, at least not in the ways envisaged by the authors discussed above. The ‘quality’ approach to everyday life in peacebuilding focuses on specific forms of world-building – such as practices of caring, communication and resistance – that fit within a conception of everyday life as a place of enhanced experience. However, the analysis of threatworks reveals that the dimension of control is just as powerful within everyday life at a local level. Indeed, this analysis also confounds the assumption that control in everyday life is a property of international/external actors. In this case, local practices, traditions and forms of world-building are used to control threats or violence, whether from ‘other’ ethnic groups or in the form of large-scale changes emanating from peace interventions or broader trends, such as global economic fluctuations. Finally, the analysis of threatworks casts doubt on the assumption that control in peacebuilding may create a trade-off between its own logics and the qualities of life offered by ‘local’ forms of agency. The idea of threatworks suggests that there are many forms of control and dynamics of power – including those engaged in by ‘local’ actors. Within threatworks, local, often traditional forms of control are used to protect plural worlds and forms of world-building, and thus to secure certain qualities of life for those who inhabit them – not least by limiting the eruption of violence or the threat thereof. However, threatworks tend to be perceived by international actors as evidence of violence, recidivism or even crime, largely because they challenge or disrupt the preferred means for controlling violence promoted by national or international actors.Footnote ¹³⁷

As such, the example of threatworks suggests that the impulse towards control may emerge from ‘local’ actors as well as ‘international’ ones. Although it may be realised in forms which contest or even conflict with the goals of international actors – for instance, in creating neutral or inclusive spaces – it may have a range of counterintuitive positive effects with regards to peace and violence. For instance, it may empower communities to resist the threat of violence and eradication through plural (if conflictual) forms of world-building, rather than through the destruction of plural worlds that accompanies violence. It may also empower these actors to control violence in ways that resonate with their own immediate, lived experience, rather than international norms of security. In this sense, it may contribute to the elements of authentic experience, plurality and immediate social interaction associated with the qualities of life discussed above. From this perspective, the example of threatworks suggests that local forms of control in the form of threatworks or conflictual world-building may in fact be crucial to protecting or enhancing the quality or qualities of everyday life in contexts of violence.