This research seeks to study the peacebuilding strategies used in South Sudan. It is interested in the interaction between the liberal peacebuilding framework and the “local turn” as manifested in the strategy adopted by peacebuilding organisations in Africa. The local turn and local ownership only enjoy rhetorical acceptance and prove to be challenging to operationalise. This research critically analyses the ideological policies and implementation impact of strategies used, especially relating to the inclusion as well as the exclusion of “the local”. As local ownership in peace processes is essential in ensuring sustainability, the research is interested in the position that the “local” voices and “local” peace actors occupy in post-independence peace strategies and policies employed mainly through the liberal framework in South Sudan. It is in the light of the top-down liberal peacebuilding framework that this research provides an analysis of the bottom-up strategies that can be identified in the case of South Sudan. The research will thus identify types of discourses, beliefs, practices and ideologies that have been adopted in South Sudan’s peacebuilding interventions by both the local and external actors and their implications. Using the different strategies employed by the external and internal peace actors as a unit of analysis, the research will aim to find out how the peace strategies employed in South Sudan include “the local” approach, how local and external actors interact and the implications of this relationship for peace in South Sudan. This research employs a critical theory approach to analyse the inclusion of “the local” in peacebuilding and the existing relationship between the liberal peacebuilding framework and the local turn. This will be done using a qualitative approach and a phenomenological design. Since the current strategies do not exist in a vacuum, historical process tracing will be conducted to understand and evaluate the effect and the change of strategies employed by external and internal actors in the past and possible current implications. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Political Sciences / PhD / Unrestricted

This thesis critically examines the role of suffering in violence, by applying a postmodern perspective to empirical examples gathered during fieldwork in Malmö in 2011.by Combing Bourdieu’s perspectives on practice with Turner’s concepts of space and liminality, Malmö takes on a new light. Through the criminalization of rejected asylum seekers, Malmö — otherwise a location of everyday peace — becomes an inside-out space defined by suffering where the clandestine asylum seekers are physically located within Swedish society, yet legally, culturally and socially located outside. Within this space bought into existence through the creation of clandestine asylum seekers new social relationships are formed — new ways of ‘being in the world’. In this thesis the clandestine asylum seekers are facilitating the altruistic and philanthropic practices of volunteers, whilst simultaneously becoming a utility for personal gain through exploitation. By examining these newly created social relations this thesis explores the experiences of suffering from an emic perspective, which provides an alternative and holistic approach to understanding the relationalities of experiences of suffering, personhood and the social field. These relationalites of suffering are exhibited through postulates of identity, performances, ways of doing and being, subjectivities and difference, as tools for viewing the social encounters taking place in a specific field.

Urban peacebuilding has proved particularly challenging in cities contested on grounds of state legitimacy where group identities are salient. Ever since the end of the Kosovo War in 1999, the city of Mitrovica has remained divided and been further polarized by outbreaks of violence, post-war politics, and strained inter-group relations. This single case study describes and conceptualizes the empirical realities of peace in the post-war city by applying the Peace Triangle as an analytical tool for understanding the quality and characteristics of the peace that prevails beyond the cessation of large-scale violence. The author builds on the conceptual model by arguing that a more multifaceted and peace-grounded analysis of peace is necessary. The research paper concludes by suggesting an altered analytical model that may yield a more nuanced understanding of peace(s) by encompassing aspects grounded in peace-conducive activities.

This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of everyday peace through analysing women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah (Karenni) state in Myanmar. I argue that everyday peace cannot be detached from rigid gender hierarchies and persistent power dynamics and that analytic attention needs to be paid to women’s, often neglected, contribution to everyday peacebuilding. Drawing on a theoretical framework of everyday peace and its feminist critique and by using Björkdahl’s concept of gendered peace gaps I illustrate how women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah state are shaped by dynamics of care and silence. Both are used as arenas for women’s peacebuilding agencies but simultaneously contributes to, are coupled with or amplify gendered peace gaps. Hence, the results unveil an interesting tension between women’s peacebuilding agency and the peace being built as the peacebuilding limits the grounds in which women can operate consequently contributing to a future gender-discriminatory peace in Myanmar. Through this focus, this thesis adds to the rich and longstanding feminist literature exploring the everyday by illustrating the importance of understanding peace based on everyday experiences shaped by gendered power relations. By exposing the relationship between power and agency I illustrate how women’s ambiguous peace agencies are incused by gendered power relations and might run the risk of reproducing or maintaining existing structures of power.

This thesis critiques liberal peacebuilding in Africa, with a particular focus on Sierra Leone. In particular, it examines the interface between the liberal peace and the “local”, the forms of agency that various local actors are expressing in response to the liberal peace and the hybrid forms of peace that are emerging in Sierra Leone. The thesis is built from an emerging critical literature that has argued for the need to shift from merely criticising liberal peacebuilding to examining local and contextual responses to it. Such contextualisation is crucial mainly because it helps us to develop a better understanding of the complex dynamics on the ground. The aim of this thesis is not to provide a new theory but to attempt to use the emerging insights from the critical scholarship through adopting the concept of hybridity in order to gain an understanding of the forms of peace that are emerging in post-conflict zones in Africa. This has not been comprehensively addressed in the context of post-conflict societies in Africa. Yet, much contemporary peace support operations are taking place in these societies that are characterised by multiple sources of legitimacy, authority and sovereignty. The thesis shows that in Sierra Leone local actors – from state elites to chiefs to civil society to ordinary people on the “margins of the state” – are not passive recipients of the liberal peace. It sheds new light on how hybridity can be created “from below” as citizens do not engage in outright resistance, but express various forms of agency including partial acceptance and internalisation of some elements of the liberal peace that they find useful to them; and use them to make demands for reforms against state elites who they do not trust and often criticise for their pre-occupation with political survival and consolidation of power. Further, it notes that in Sierra Leone a “post-liberal peace” that is locally-oriented might emerge on the “margins of the state” where culture, custom and tradition are predominant, and where neo-traditional civil society organisations act as vehicles for both the liberal peace and customary peacebuilding while allowing locals to lead the peacebuilding process. In Sierra Leone, there are also peace processes that are based on custom that are operating in parallel to the liberal peace, particularly in remote parts of the country.