Roger Mac Ginty’s book is a fascinating and welcome attempt in the literature of peace studies to unveil a lacuna that many mainstream IR peace scholars (like myself) have usually ignored in the last three decades: the “micro-level” and “hyper-local” levels of analysis that focus on individuals, ‘real’ people, and small groups, in prompting practices of peace, toleration, conciliation, and co-existence in situations of violent conflicts, leading to some form of de-escalation, or what the author calls “disrupting conflict” (on de-escalation, see Louis Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts, 1998). By combining an elaborated theoretical framework with a myriad of empirical illustrations and examples drawn from the Everyday Peace Indicators project (EPI) and other sources, the author emphasises a form of peace that has usually been ignored in the literature, “everyday peace.”
“Everyday peace” is defined as “the capacity of so-called ordinary people to disrupt violent conflict and forge pro-social relationships in conflict-affected societies” (p. 2). It refers to ‘small’ and informal practices of peace that involve pragmatism, common sense, emotional intelligence, and actions of sheer or basic humanity, empathy, and compassion at the grassroots level, even below the level of organized forms within the civil society. It might happen in very mundane and innocuous places like the working place, the school, and the grocery store. In a sense, the concept of “everyday peace” mirrors the idea of reconciliation, though it appears at the other end of the scale between conflict and harmony. Unlike reconciliation, “everyday peace” generally appears in the midst of violent and unresolved conflicts, rather than after their formal resolution (on reconciliation, see Yaacov Bar-Siman Tov, From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation, 2003). Thus, Mac Ginty operationalizes “everyday peace” by dissecting it into its three components along a continuum of increasing empathy with fellow human beings. The first, basic component is that of “sociality,” as an initial affective condition (of empathy). The second, which is an integral part of the concept of cooperation, is that of “reciprocity,” based on utilitarian calculations, not necessarily altruistic. The third and more advanced component of “everyday peace” is “solidarity,” less common than the two others, due to the onerous cost for the individual who expresses it towards fellow human beings, at the risk of paying a political, economic, and social cost.
One of the main arguments elaborated in the book is that everyday peace is important and relevant, since its instances and practices can put in motion a virtue cycle, a ripple effect, and ‘boomerang’ diffusion mechanisms of “scaling out” (horizontally) and “scaling up” (vertically), to other, ‘higher’ levels of analysis (from the family to the local, from the local to the municipal, from the municipal to the regional, from the regional to the national, and from the national to the transnational). In an elaborated theoretical framework (in Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7), Mac Ginty develops the concepts of “circuity and scalability” that follow the logic of multi-scalar levels of analysis by implying that these ‘small’ instances of peace can be reproduced into bottom-up processes, nurturing peace in larger contexts (Chapter 1). Furthermore, after clearly explaining the components of sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity in Chapter 2, Mac Ginty moves in Chapter 3 to develop an ambitious theoretical proposition that equates “everyday peace” with intangible and ‘soft’ forms of power, in juxtaposition to orthodox, ‘harsh’ instances of power (like the use of force). Finally, in Chapter 7, Mac Ginty expands on the meaning of the ambiguous concept of "conflict disruption" by referring to alternative narratives to the ‘official story,’ actions that contradict the logic of conflict, and the challenging of conflict mentality (pp. 203-204). This is illustrated through instances of “remarkable friendships” across potential enemies, though the friends are not always ‘ordinary people’ but belong to the political elite (like the case of Raymonda Taiwil and Ruth Dayan across the Israeli-Palestinian divide, pp. 197-199).
What makes the reading of this book particularly fascinating is the diverse, and sometimes contradictory sources and methodologies, as presented in Chapters 4-6. Throughout the book, the author relies upon the Everyday Peace Indicators Project (EPI) that collected data from local communities in Colombia, South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe (although there is not enough specificity about these indicators, beyond the three components of everyday peace). The book also relies on interviews conducted in (former or current) conflict zones such as Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Furthermore, particularly interesting and ‘outside of the box’ are Chapters 4 and 5, which rely on personal diaries and memoirs of combatants from World War One and World War Two that showed, in these two extreme cases of violent conflict and hegemonic wars, acts of humanity, compassion, empathy, and reciprocity, partly based on self-interest (like the famous cases of cooperation of ‘live and let live’ policies of survival in the trench warfare of World War I), and occasional acts of altruism. Although the reading is moving and the argument is compelling, I would be reluctant to refer to these acts of humanity within the two world wars as instances of peace. In contrast, in Chapter 6, the best chapter in the book that combines theory and empirics in a brilliant way, Mac Ginty refers to “gender and everyday peace,” by focusing on the family and the everyday actions and processes, including practical mechanisms of everyday peace such as “positive parenting and mentoring,” “restraint,” and “avoidance by proxy,” in different contexts.
As this is a path-breaking and ambitious piece of scholarship, it has also some flaws, at least in the subjective eyes of this beholder. In the first place, and reflecting somehow critical and post-positivist contributions to peace, Roger Mac Ginty is not only critical, but I think overly critical of the discipline of international relations, sometimes engaging in digressions that present the mainstream literature in Manichean terms or stereotypical terms. Thus, in his view, the orthodox understandings of power ignore its relational dimension (they do not), and focus only on “domination” (p.83), whereas the key, even in the mainstream literature, remains the focus on influence and the distinction between power and force.
Second, although I agree with the author that "everyday peace" is indeed a crucial (and understudied) initial and ‘hyper-local’ form of peace, sometimes the concept is over-stretched and confusing, like in the cases of World War I and World War II, when compared and juxtaposed to more formal categories of peace, such as ‘negative peace’ If we define negative peace, which is the minimalist conceptualization of peace, as the absence of war, then “parley, truce, and ceasefire” do not really qualify as negative peace (pp. 104-105), they are even less than that. That of course does not rule out the fact that acts of humanity, tolerance, and conciliation, can take place in the most extreme cases of total war. Still, I would not call these actions “everyday peace,” restricting the concept to cases of violent and usually domestic conflicts, including civil wars.
Third, although the author argues for a necessary dialogue and complementarity between the top-down and bottom-up peace processes through his theoretical arguments about multi-scale levels of analysis and “circuitry,” by the end of the day (and the book), there is no clear evidence, and perhaps it might be impossible to provide a clear causal link, leading from the essential and paramount manifestations of hyper-local, ‘small’ actions in the direction of peace, and their translation into higher, formal political levels of analysis. I am not convinced by his example that after a Sudanese soldier decided to protect civilian protesters, a few days later the Sudanese dictator Bashir was deposed (p. 50). It might be my own positivist bias, but there is not necessarily a direct or causal link here. I agree that everyday peace is often “context-dependent” (p. 221), but by indicating that important truism, we still do not know under which conditions it might scale up or scale out, flourishing in the direction of a more humane and tolerant world that we all need.
In sum, this book should be a required reading for everybody interested in peace studies, especially those among us who spend too many decades looking at theoretical categories and levels of analysis at the global, regional, and national, while ignoring the importance (and vitality) of individuals that have the courage, and the humanity, in de-escalating and disrupting conflicts, which unlike earthquakes, are human interactions that could be changed. Hence, I invite Roger Mac Ginty (and/or other optimist scholars in the field), to rise to the occasion and attempt to look more closely, both in theoretical and empirical terms, at the necessary interaction between bottom-up and top-down peace processes, both crucial ingredients to bring, sustain, and keep peace. This interaction is initially formulated and sketched in the book, but the intellectual journey has to be continued, and completed.
