The question of what exactly constitutes peace or, more concretely, how to conceptualize and measure its attainment is central to the pursuit and success of peace-building interventions in conflict-affected countries. It has thus been one of the central lines of inquiry animating the wide-ranging and expansive peace studies and peace-building scholarship, from Johan Galtung’s path-breaking distinction between negative peace (the absence of violence) and positive peace (societal resilience to conflict) down to today (see Galtung,“Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research, 6 [3], 1969). With Reclaiming Everyday Peace, Pamina Firchow makes an original contribution to the study of peace measurement, both advancing the conceptual frontier and delivering granular empirical findings in a concise text.
Firchow’s approach to measuring and evaluating peace is rooted firmly in the now extensive “local turn” of the peace-building literature (e.g., Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance, 2011; Oliver P. Richmond, Failed Statebuilding, 2014). Turning a critical eye on the very concept and on the practices of international peace building, scholars working within this school of thought have bemoaned a myopia about local, indigenous views toward and experiences of peace. They have argued that interventions must absorb these local perspectives to address the needs of societies emerging from conflict and to build tangible peace in local communities. Along these lines, Firchow’s framework for understanding and measuring peace rests explicitly on the insight that the would-be beneficiaries of peace interventions define success in peace consolidation in very different ways from external interveners. To emphasize this point, she draws the distinction between big-P peace building, involving macro, top-down, and all-encompassing interventions, and small-p peace building, focused more on community-level, bottom-up, and relational transformation.
The book is thus first and foremost a clarion call, advanced in part I, for a concerted effort to develop community-defined indicators of peace that “actively include communities not only in the evaluation, and monitoring of external interventions, but also in programming design” (p. 3). In chapters 1 and 2, Firchow offers an extensive critique of the universal, one-size-fits-all evaluation systems that are typically used by external peace-building organizations in a top-down fashion in the communities in which they work; she makes the case instead for using locally contextualized measures of peace that capture “indigenous technical knowledge” (pp. 62–66). She then develops, in chapter 3, an approach to collecting precisely such bottom-up, participatory, community-defined measures in the form of the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) methodology.
Reclaiming Everyday Peace also delivers, in part II, a fascinating demonstration of how Firchow applies the EPI methodology to her own specific empirical study. Her research is built on a carefully selected matched case design of four communities, two each in Colombia and Uganda, along with a labor- and time-intensive process of working with individuals in the chosen communities to generate their own specific, tangible definitions of peace. Through a series of focus groups facilitated by local research teams, these communities isolated a range of factors by which they evaluate peace themselves, such as whether they felt safe walking home at night, local business success, infrastructure development, and so on. Firchow and her team then grouped these community-specific measures of peace into macro categories, such as daily security, conflict resolution, food and agriculture, and economic development; then they further aggregated them into four dimensions—security, human rights, development, and social—to enable the identification of trends over time and comparisons across the four cases.
Firchow asserts that the more granular, locally specific indicators can be valuable for targeted evaluation and hence enable better programming in the communities themselves. The different levels of external intervention between within-country community pairs, combined with longitudinal community surveys of the community-generated indicators, enable Firchow to conclude that the localities that received a higher degree of external intervention do not have substantively higher levels of peacefulness than those with lower levels of intervention. As expected, the different communities defined peacefulness in varied ways, using a range of tangible measures. Firchow’s major empirical cross-case finding is that the communities in which violent conflict was more distant in time tended to identify more positive peace indicators, related to conflict resolution and societal resilience, than negative peace indicators, related to violence and physical security. Moreover, assessing locally defined peace priorities against external assistance programs reveals that the nature and distribution of the supposed benefits of these interventions are at odds with the needs of the communities in question.
Given the rigor of the framework and the effort devoted to data collection, it is disappointing that these comparative empirical conclusions are not more substantial. Such findings have already been established by large-N and case-oriented studies of peace building in the positivist vein (epitomized, respectively, by Michael Doyle and Nicolas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace, 2006, and Roland Paris, At War’s End, 2004), as well as in the more thickly described sociological and interpretivist scholarship (e.g., Severine Autesserre, Peaceland, 2014). Firchow believes that too much emphasis in the peace-building scholarship is placed on national-level elite politics, resulting in the elision of the truly lived local experience of peace at the community level: thus the “state” or “government,” even at the local level, is (deliberately) almost entirely absent in both the conceptual and empirical sections of the book. Yet, by entirely setting aside the interaction between national and local state officials and international organizations, which forms a central aspect of the peace-building scholarship (e.g., Naazneen H. Barma, The Peacebuilding Puzzle, 2017), Firchow loses the opportunity to drill down more on how local communities interact with local elites in the actual politics of building local peace and to explain why the mismatch between community needs and forms of assistance is so persistent.
The central conceptual claim of Reclaiming Everyday Peace is that, through the process of aggregation from community-defined indicators to categories and then macro-dimensions, “experience-near indicators can help us count and populate experience-distant categories and dimensions more effectively” (p. 111). What is by turns innovative and, ultimately, also stymieing about Firchow’s work is that she has developed a hybrid conceptual framework that offers real advances in thinking about peace, yet she leaves the reader to grapple with some central unresolved theoretical and practical tensions. On the one hand, she adopts a positivist or problem-solving approach, with the explicit goal of improving peace operations through evidence-based policy making. On the other hand, she shares the ontological position of critical theorists of peace building in emphasizing the need to understand peace from the perspective of the “peacekept,” the recipients of interventions, rather than the purveyors of peacekeeping. This hybrid approach delivers an innovative process for generating community-defined peace indicators that measure in high fidelity how local communities experience peace or the lack thereof.
Yet the book falls short in making the case that this approach is truly replicable and scalable in terms of linking up experience-near community indicators to experience-distant universal measuring efforts, in systematic and cumulative ways. Without that concrete connection between bottom-up and top-down, Firchow cannot really make the case for the ultimate value of the EPI approach to the stated goal of improving measurement that, in turn, will improve policy making—or to returning some measure of agency and power to the peacekept from the peacekeepers. The reader is left with the tantalizing possibility, but not the directions, for how big-P and small-p—or exogenous and indigenous approaches to—peace building can really be harmonized in the way that Firchow desires. Fortunately, she has crystallized beautifully what it could actually mean to develop bottom-up, community-defined measures of peace. This makes her book an important contribution to peace studies and charts an expanded research agenda for those interested in further conceptualizing how indigenous and exogenous indicators could be reconciled to improve project design and to better measure peace-building effectiveness at different scales.
