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Liberal-local peacebuilding in Solomon Islands and Bougainville: Advancing a gender-just peace?
Abstract
The ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has been inspired by the idea that post-conflict order is made more just, representative and legitimate when there is greater recognition and incorporation of local sites of authority. However, the gendered visions of security that may be projected from these spheres have often escaped critical attention. This oversight continues despite growing feminist interest in understanding both the contributions that women can make to the durability of conflict settlement processes and the obstacles that often prevent those contributions from progressing. In this article, I examine the frictional encounters that occur between the local and the liberal in peacebuilding and focus particularly on what this means for women. I argue that a focus on vernacular security provides a productive analytical lens for answering this question and for building understanding of where and how women are advantaged and disadvantaged by projects of post-conflict transition. My findings demonstrate how the security vernaculars that are generated in liberal–local peacebuilding produce scenarios that are often contradictory for women and can be enabling and constraining in different contexts. The discussion draws from recent research findings on the gendered impacts of peacebuilding and post-conflict restoration in Bougainville, an autonomous territory of Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands.
... Despite Bubandt's (2005 ) initial focus on Indonesia, the "vernacular turn" initially concentrated on UK citizens' constructions of (in)security (e.g., Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016b ), especially in the counter-terrorism space (e.g., Jarvis and Lister 2016 ). More recent work, however, has taken as its focus dynamics including the policing of gender and sexuality in Fiji ( George 2017 ); the lived (in)security experiences of internally displaced persons in Nigeria ( Oyawale 2022 ); and the postconflict work of development organizations in the North Waziristan district of Pakistan ( Makki and Tahir 2021 ). A shared dissatisfaction with "the prevalent elitist focus on politicians, security professionals and private security companies-even in the 'critical' study of the politics of threat and (in)security" ( Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016b , 43) focuses attention, in this work, on the experiences of people sub-ject to, or governed by, security policy in quotidian and everyday sites such as homes, workplaces, and public spaces. ...
... This is, not least, due to the opportunities opened for inductive research once a priori assumptions about the nature or meaning of (in)security are removed: "Security in the vernacular" emphasises that those who are vulnerable and insecure are not just social categories but people, groups and communities, who perceive, cope with and respond to violence in ways that differ, sometimes radically, not only from the dominant state security narratives, but sometimes also from universal conceptions of human and citizen security. ( Luckham 2017 , 112) This openness has been analytically productive-facilitating conversation with proximate theoretical concerns, including around gendered norms ( George 2017 ;Hart 2022 ), identity ( Croft and Vaughan-Williams 2017 ), human security ( Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi 2017 ), emergency politics ( Kurylo 2022 ), and peacebuilding ( George 2018 ). It has also been generative of a valuable methodological pluralism, with early focus group research complemented by recent engagements with creative methods such as body-mapping ( Badurdeen et al. 2022 ), digital storytelling ( Atakav et al. 2020 ), and visual analysis ( Downing 2021 ;Nyman 2021 ). ...
... This is, not least, due to the opportunities opened for inductive research once a priori assumptions about the nature or meaning of (in)security are removed: "Security in the vernacular" emphasises that those who are vulnerable and insecure are not just social categories but people, groups and communities, who perceive, cope with and respond to violence in ways that differ, sometimes radically, not only from the dominant state security narratives, but sometimes also from universal conceptions of human and citizen security. ( Luckham 2017 , 112) This openness has been analytically productive-facilitating conversation with proximate theoretical concerns, including around gendered norms ( George 2017 ;Hart 2022 ), identity ( Croft and Vaughan-Williams 2017 ), human security ( Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi 2017 ), emergency politics ( Kurylo 2022 ), and peacebuilding ( George 2018 ). It has also been generative of a valuable methodological pluralism, with early focus group research complemented by recent engagements with creative methods such as body-mapping ( Badurdeen et al. 2022 ), digital storytelling ( Atakav et al. 2020 ), and visual analysis ( Downing 2021 ;Nyman 2021 ). ...
Recent years have witnessed a “vernacular turn” in critical security scholarship centered on everyday constructions of (in)security. In this article, I advance this turn by arguing for greater attention to the role of numbers in non-elite discourse on (in)security. Doing so deepens understanding of the mechanisms and registers through which (in)securities are constructed in the vernacular while conceptually strengthening work on vernacular security through insight from literature on the rhetorical, sociological, and political functions of numbers. To pursue this claim, the article develops a new methodological framework through which to explore the work of numbers in vernacular security discourse before applying it to original focus group data on (counter-)radicalization. From this, I highlight the importance of numerical arguments in vernacular constructions of threat, evaluation of security policies, contestation of dominant security discourses, and performances of security literacy.
... The traditional and local systems have remained prominent, particularly throughout the non-urban regions, where much of the population generally resides (Watson et al., 2022). A key critique is that the liberal peace approach has been imposed on postconflict states by external partners (George, 2018). Post-conflict states are expected to make progress on police reform by meeting targets and agendas of international donor partners. ...
... For these reasons, a second approach has been recommended. The 'liberallocal' peace approach, also known as 'hybrid peace' aims to generate necessary local support that will ensure the sustainability of peace in the long term by incorporating both liberal frameworks and existing local sources of authority (George, 2018;Wallis et al., 2018). This approach suggests a more mutual implementation and respect for the history, culture, and traditions of the host country. ...
... This approach suggests a more mutual implementation and respect for the history, culture, and traditions of the host country. However, limited research attention has examined what it means for gender-sensitive reform (George, 2018). For example, in Bougainville, a tradition of matrilineal inheritance and women's customary status as carers for land allowed some opportunities for women's recognition and inclusion in peacebuilding and decision-making processes. ...
Peacekeeping and peacebuilding in conflict-affected states are key areas of endeavour in international policing. Following an initial peacekeeping phase, the focus shifts to peacebuilding. As part of state-building agendas that promote the maintenance of peace after conflict, police officers from contributing countries are involved in the establishment, reform and capacity development of police organisations. These programmes typically incorporate a focus on gender, due in part to increased awareness of the gendered impacts of conflict, and increased recognition of women’s formal and informal roles in resolving conflict. Since 2000, the United Nations (UN) has called for a gender perspective, through UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, and subsequent resolutions. However, effective implementation is not straightforward. This chapter considers some complex challenges associated with integrating a gender perspective in peacebuilding and highlights some examples of promising achievements in peacebuilding for women and policing.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003283263-13/women-policing-peacebuilding-post-conflict-states-loene-howes
... However, the local turn is associated with important challenges, including the oft-partisan nature of most local settings (Mac Ginty 2008Ginty , 2010Ginty , 2011Öjendal, Leonardsson, and Lundqvist 2017), the difficulty in identifying the best suitable local agents in ethnically divided peacebuilding contexts (Hellmüller 2014), the simplified and linear understanding of local involvement (linked mostly to numerical addition) with little attention to complex structural impediments (Nicole 2018); and a less critical view of the potential of hybrid orders in contributing sustained peace (Nadarajah and Rampton 2015). The bottom line is that these challenges impede meaningful local capacity-building for sustained peace, which reduces the potential for resilient structures. ...
... Scholars including Cousins (2014), Fraenkel et al. (2014), George (2018), and have placed their focus on exploring the extent of gender equality consideration and implementation within the RSIPF, as well as mapping gender transformation in the force and assessing the mission's shortcomings and commending its successes in gender implementations. However, a number of these studies have not provided a critical assessment and review of this reform measure as it relates to the operation of the force itself. ...
In countries emerging out of conflict, state-building initiatives tend to prioritize gender-balancing. Post-conflict police reform in the Solomon Islands aligned with this set standard, as capacity-building efforts within the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) prioritized the empowerment, inclusion, and promotion of women within the force. Through the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) this study investigated, identified, and described common perceptions held by eighteen (18) officers about how they viewed gender reform in the RSIPF. The research found that although officers believed that gender-balancing was necessary, the increased inclusion of women conflicted with their traditional roles and positions and brought several challenges to the effective functioning of the force. It was also revealed that officers were of the view that the organization was not yet ready to fully embrace gender-balancing. The arguments presented herein further build on scholarly discussions about gender equality in policing organizations in small-island developing states in the Pacific.
... Many authors have placed their focus on examining gender equality in the RSIPF. (2014), Greener et al. (2011), George (2018), and Fraenkel et al. (2014 have placed their focus on exploring the extent of gender equality consideration and implementation within the RSIPF, as well as mapping gender transformation within the RSIPF and assessing the mission's failures and commending its successes in gender implementations. However, a number of these studies have not provided a critical assessment and review of this reform measure as it related to the operation of the force itself. ...
Much scholarly attention has been placed on studying the period of ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands and examining the role of the RAMSI in re-establishing safety and security in the nation’s capital. A key component of the mission’s agenda was the reform of the local police force, the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF). While several interesting areas have been explored, ranging from investigating the cause of the crisis to assessing the mission’s impact, scant attention has been placed on examining, interpreting, and presenting the experiences and perceptions of institutional change held by officers within the RSIPF. In light of this deficiency, this study aimed to explore police officers’ perceptions of reform, the factors that accounted for these perceptions and to discover how these perceptions changed at the end of reform. In an attempt to do so, the phenomenological research method was used
to investigate, identify and describe common perceptions regarding how police officers experienced institutional reform. The study utilised semi-structured in-depth interviews with eighteen (18) RSIPF officers with service ranging between fifteen (15) to twenty-five (25) years, from diverse provinces, ranks and departments. The research found that officers had a largely positive perception of the mission and institutional
transformation for reasons including Australia’s leading role in the mission, capacity development within the force and the return of public trust and confidence to the RSIPF. However, despite this perception, a number of areas of concern and for redress were identified.
... In doing so, we offer a new way of thinking about why and how member states adopt 1325 NAPs. Many studies seeking to understand the evolution and impacts of global peacebuilding policy, including the WPS agenda, have focused either on the process of shaping of norms and frameworks at the international level (Basu 2016a;Cook 2016;Gibbings 2011;True and Wiener 2019) or on their impact and interaction with the local (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013;George 2018;McLeod 2015). Here we have chosen to interrogate the missing middle: to study the policy entrepreneurs that work transnationally to construct interpretive communities to support preferred policy agendas and make continuous efforts to maintain their own membership and authority within these policy communities. ...
This article explores a narrative of peacebuilding best practice: the national efforts to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in Nepal. We demonstrate how the contested realities of post-conflict gender politics are skilfully transformed into internationally transferable policy knowledge. We argue that in order to construct a peacebuilding best practice, policy entrepreneurs draw on their social capital to make claims about policy as simultaneously local and context-specific as well as global and universally applicable. The credibility of the claims is based on the extent to which they can be presented to international policy audiences in formats suitable for their consumption.
... Part of the issue here, though, is that terms such as 'local' and 'international' are vague and can easily slide into dichotomous usage. Feminist analysis has argued that the hybridity frame fails to confront the gendered geometries of power that may be locally sharpened in conflict environments and that prevent women's access to peacebuilding sites with the result that their expectations and needs are represented back to them by local elites, marginalised or simply ignored (Björkdahl and Höglund, 2013;George, 2016George, , 2018. Emphasis upon the distance between the local and the international has also masked, it is claimed, the co-constitutive nature of the relationship between local and international and the ways that the 'local is partially produced by what internationals find, initiate or are willing to fund' (Heathershaw, 2013: 280). ...
This introduction provides an overview for the following collection of articles that engage with, and aim to extend, recent scholarship emphasising space as a category of analysis in peace and conflict studies. Attempts to ‘spatialise’ this field of enquiry have emphasised the ways actors and ideas travel and transform across scale (from the personal to the local, regional and global) and how agents, actors and identities constitute, and are constituted by, space and place in dynamics of conflict and peace. Attention to space has increased appreciation of the complex nature of nature of war- and peace-‘scapes’, and reflects upon space as material and symbolic, given meaning through peoples’ embodied activity and interactions. The articles in this issue engage with the foundations of the spatial turn and build upon innovations in spatial analysis of peace and conflict by focussing on the idea of ‘emplacement’ and emplaced security as critical to peacebuilding efforts and processes of conflict transition. To do so, we consider place in a relational sense, focussing on attachment, affective connection and narratives of place-identity as these are connected with conflict management, security, governance and political ordering.
... Recent years have witnessed expanded interest in the diverse ways in which international politics manifests itself throughout "everyday" life. This interest can be seen, first, in contemporary work on the gendered relations and norms that police the behavior and expectations of "ordinary" people (George, 2018), work which builds on long-standing feminist concern with the exclusion or forgetting of mundane, personal experiences in dominant sociopolitical imaginaries (e.g., Enloe, 2011Enloe, , 2014. Complementary research on "vernacular security," similarly, concerns itself with how "ordinary" citizens understand and experience (in)security, seeking a potentially useful corrective to the tendency within contemporary-including critical-scholarship to "speak for, rather than to (or, perhaps better, with) 'ordinary' people and the conditions of (in)security they experience, encounter or construct in everyday life" (Jarvis & Lister, 2013, p. 158). ...
This article reflects on methodological decisions, strategies, and challenges from a recent interdisciplinary project on the relationship between “British values” and Islam. The project employed digital storytelling to access “everyday” conceptions and constructions of this contentious relationship. The research was undertaken by participant researchers recruited from Muslim communities in the UK’s East Anglia region, working with academics from media studies and political science. In this article, we offer a detailed account of key moments relating especially to recruitment, retention, and the production of digital content. It offers two contributions. First, methodological guidance for researchers interested in combining participatory research with digital storytelling. And second, rationale for so doing given the methodology’s scope for producing rich visual content with capacity (i) to deepen and disrupt established knowledge and (ii) to change the views, ideas, and aspirations of those involved in the content’s creation.
After going through an eleven yearlong violent civil war, Sierra Leone started its peacebuilding process in 2002. This operation has been considered a successful one. In the paper, I focus on one of its instruments: the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC). This body promoted truth telling to establish accountability and to know the needs in society. The aim was to determine to which extent it incorporated the local perspective. To this end, different ways of incorporating the local perspective have been used. At the same time, I also looked at its gender approach, where both successful and shortcomings were found. I conclude that neither of the perspective was well consolidated.
Many women have continued to engage in local peacebuilding activities in the face of massive failures of formal peacekeeping missions in the Sahel region of Africa, where the world's fastest-growing and most deadly insurgent groups are found. Women are largely excluded from these missions. Instead, they are most active in grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, where their impact is significant, yet often overlooked. Women's localized peacebuilding activities can have transformative impacts on gender relations and roles and on society more broadly. We examine women's efforts specifically in the context of significant failures and setbacks of formal peace efforts. Using in-depth interviews with women engaged in grassroots peacebuilding in Mali and Nigeria, where ongoing regional jihadist insurgencies and political instability persist, we identify three important mechanisms through which women are responding to these massive setbacks: (1) Women build ties across religious, ethnic, pastoralist-nomad, and other divisions central to the conflict, addressing the very divides that formal peace processes have struggled to overcome; (2) Women engage in income-generating activities and community and peacebuilding initiatives that challenge traditional gender roles and increase women's empowerment; and (3) Women's daily peacebuilding activities have multiplier effects, improving not only their own welfare but that of their households and communities. This article contributes to our understanding of how women's peacebuilding activities can have transformative effects in the face of setbacks. It draws on in-depth interviews with women peacebuilders from Mali and Nigeria.
After going through an eleven yearlong violent civil war, Sierra Leone started its peacebuilding process in 2002. This operation has been considered a successful one. In the paper, I focus on one of its instruments: the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC). This body promoted truth telling to establish accountability and to know the needs in society. The aim was to determine to which extent it incorporated the local perspective. To this end, different ways of incorporating the local perspective have been used. At the same time, I also looked at its gender approach, where both successful and shortcomings were found. I conclude that neither of the perspective was well consolidated.
This discussion examines how and why the peacebuilding environment in Solomon Islands presents profound constraints for women despite the promises of global, regional, and national policy stipulating the importance of this activity. The analysis draws on theories of scale to explain how gendered geometries of power are configured in the Solomon Islands peacebuilding environment. These power geometries are shaped by interplaying local and global factors and have limited the space that is open to women peacebuilders. A “crisis response” orientation to Australian-led conflict stabilization missions has been coupled with a national bureaucratic tendency to equate “customary governance” with peacebuilding. Both trends have augmented masculine power and constrained the space for women to engage in conflict mediation. As I show, these developments contradict United Nations Women Peace and Security principles, set out in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and localized in National Action Plans developed in Australia and in Solomon Islands. These expressly stipulate the importance of supporting women’s contributions to peacebuilding when conflict flares. The article’s analysis makes clear how women continue to push against these constraints, but against overwhelming pressures. It concludes with the claim that conflict mediation processes can only be made more durable in Solomon Islands if the discriminatory gendered geometries of power identified are confronted and greater emphasis is placed on women’s customary authority and capacities as peacebuilders.
The ‘local’ as a site of peacebuilding and as a subject position has played a significant role in scholarly debates on peacebuilding and international intervention, and increasingly so in work on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Local women are called upon to represent the conflict experience, and localisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda is becoming part of the rhetoric around implementation. This article examines the impacts of this focus with reference to peacebuilding and women’s inclusion initiatives in Iraq in locations previously held by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The article analyses three programmatic case studies situated in Ninewa, a governorate in northern Iraq. The analysis offers a four-part typology of local women participants – local women as peacebuilders, a-political (and a-sectarian), non-elite and intermediary – and uses these types to explore how the participation and presence of local women is constructed within peacebuilding programming. By introducing these types, this article makes visible the practical and conceptual impact of the focus on the ‘local’ on the Women, Peace and Security agenda, its implementation in post-conflict contexts, and on how local women and their contributions are perceived in Women, Peace and Security-focused peacebuilding interventions.
Legal scholars, economists, and international development practitioners often assume that the state is capable of 'securing' rights to land and addressing gender inequality in land tenure. In this innovative study of land tenure in Solomon Islands, Rebecca Monson challenges these assumptions. Monson demonstrates that territorial disputes have given rise to a legal system characterised by state law, custom, and Christianity, and that the legal construction and regulation of property has, in fact, deepened gender inequalities and other forms of social difference. These processes have concentrated formal land control in the hands of a small number of men leaders, and reproduced the state as a hypermasculine domain, with significant implications for public authority, political participation, and state formation. Drawing insights from legal scholarship and political ecology in particular, this book offers a significant study of gender and legal pluralism in the Pacific, illuminating ongoing global debates about gender inequality, land tenure, ethnoterritorial struggles and the post colonial state.
Although there is growing recognition that women’s participation is critical for the durability of peaceful conflict transition, grounded research examining the political scale of women’s participation has not been common. Where feminist researchers have tackled this topic, they have generally reproduced binary representations of political space, sometimes strongly critical of local spaces as restrictive of women, sometimes strongly critical of a hegemonic liberal international. In this article, I address the issue of women’s participation in conflict transition governance from another more ethnographic angle, drawing from fieldwork conducted in the Solomon Islands, a Pacific Islands country destabilised by conflict in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I apply theories of political scale to consider where and how women are politically active in the conflict transition environment, how that political activity is constituted relative to other political scales and where and how women seek to make their political ambitions understood. The ‘emplacement’ lens I develop offers a critical vantage point for analysis of the ways women constitute political identities and the agendas they might meaningfully progress, at scales ranging from the small worlds of the household and the community to the broader scale of national politics.
While women’s contributions to peacebuilding and conflict mediation are currently viewed as central to the durability of peace, women peace leaders still face constraints in their work toward a peace that is gender-just. In this article, we reflect on the gendered rules that structure the conflict transition environment in Solomon Islands, a context that is shaped by interactions between internationally driven liberal peacebuilding and local influences. Building on insights from feminist institutional analysis, we describe this environment as a complex ecology of gendered rule making in which constraints to women’s participation are formidable. Nonetheless, we are motivated to investigate whether closer attention to Indigenous deliberative institutions in this context, and perhaps in others, might offer possibilities for navigating these constraints. Our research suggests that if due consideration is given to these institutions, the political weight of women’s stories of “struggle,” “cries,” and “sweat” might drive change more effectively, making the objectives of durable and gender-just peace more attainable for those in conflict-affected societies.
This book examines questions about the changing nature of security and insecurity in Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Previous discussions of security in the Pacific region have been largely determined by the geopolitical interests of the Global North. This volume instead attempts to centre PICs’ security interests by focussing on the role of organisational culture, power dynamics and gender in (in)security processes and outcomes.
Mapping Security in the Pacific underscores the multidimensional nature of security, its relationship to local, international, organisational and cultural dynamics, the resistances engendered through various forms of insecurities, and innovative efforts to negotiate gender, context and organisational culture in reducing insecurity and enhancing justice. Covering the Pacific region widely, the volume brings forth context-specific analyses at micro-, meso- and macro-levels, allowing us to examine the interconnections between security, crime and justice, and point to the issues raised for crime and justice studies by environmental insecurity. In doing so, it opens up opportunities to rethink scholarly and policy frames related to security/insecurity about the Pacific.
Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the Pacific region and different aspects of security.
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