I am very grateful to Arie M. Kacowicz for his careful and generous review of my book, Everyday Peace: How So-called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict. He finishes his review by setting a fair challenge: how can we chart more precisely the interaction between top-down and bottom-up attempts to make peace. My book is concerned with the micro-sociology of peacemaking, co-existence, and tolerance that might be found in deeply-divided societies. Arie’s excellent book, The Unintended Consequences of Peace: Peaceful Borders and Illicit Transnational Flows, co-authored with Exequiel Lacovsky, Keren Sasson and Daniel F. Wajner, is concerned with peace between states or a macro-level peace. The challenge then, is to establish how attempts to reach peace (or some form of conflict de-escalation) at one level can inform another level.

That is no mean feat, although the Critical Dialogue forum and the side-by-side treatment of our books, with their quite different levels of analysis, is a good start. It would be very easy to use the rest of this review rejoinder to set out the various methodological problems associated with such an endeavour. Given the multiple moving parts in a peace process, there is always going to be an attribution gap as analysts seek to link inputs with outcomes (many of them unanticipated as made clear in Arie’s book). Yet a few theoretical leaps can help us with the challenge of seeing how bottom-up and top-down approaches to peace might be connected. The first of these is to see peace and conflict as constituting a single system. The system might be disjointed, extensive, partially obscured and contain contradictory elements, but it constitutes a single system. The second is to maintain plural understandings of time. Different conflict actors will abide by different timescapes, meaning that the world of negotiation deadlines and neat timelines does not apply to all.

A third theoretical leap is to promote variegated understandings of power. This means taking non-material forms of power (everything from kinship to spiritual belief) as seriously as we take men in suits who are backed-up by men with guns. Taken together, these theoretical leaps can help unburden us from dissections of peace processes that are overly beholden to legal-rational interpretations. It seems unlikely that we can develop a definitive process tracing of a peace process, given the multiple moving parts, timelines and subjectivities. Yet we can, as Arie encourages us, think of how the sociological and political interact.

We have seen, in a number of conflict-affected societies, how communities were often far ahead of political leaderships in terms of their willingness to engage in inter-group conciliation (and vice versa where political leaders went out on a limb). Trying to capture such a multi-scalar dynamic is difficult, but it is possible to think of integrated research projects that seek to track elite and popular level sentiment, and how each level operationalises peace (or conciliation, or tolerance). Social science has a lot of tools at its disposal, from life histories to perception surveys. The key seems to be an ability to see peace as a verb; a phenomenon that is made and re-made by the actions and stances of individuals and communities (at all levels), and not just a series of statements by political leaders.