Jenny Pearce
Introduction
Introduction Bernardo Arévalo de León and Ana Glenda Tager have written a succinct and substantive article, which adds to evidence of a shif from the centrality of war and conflict (armed and non-armed) in the study and practice of peace, towards a focus on violence, or rather that aspect of violence the authors call “armed social violence”. Violence, I argue, is the opposite of peace and this step towards recognising the wider expressions of violence is to be greatly welcomed. Violence is extensively studied, but in disciplinary silos. We lack a “converter” to enable us to interpret the learning from these various silos and to help us build new understandings of the varied mechanisms of violence reproduction and reduction. Despite nods to interdisciplinarity, academia reinforces the silos, while practice cannot easily embrace the complexity within and between each.
In my response to the lead article, I will follow its structure, initially by addressing the conceptual issue of why violence is best placed at the heart of peace thinking and peacebuilding and secondly, why this is so difcult to operationalise. In response to the conceptual challenges, I will argue that we need to build much greater sensitivity to the plurality of violences (see Box 1) and the feedback loops between them. Peace processes do not end violence, as the experiences of Guatemala and El Salvador illustrate (Pearce 2016). While the scale of collective and organised violence remains an urgent preoccupation, I argue that we also need to trace the way violence, as a phenomenon with multiple expressions, reproduces through time and space. Thus, while I applaud the widening of the feld of peacebuilding to acknowledge the signifcance of armed social and criminal forms, this still limits our approach to violence. I argue that we need to understand violence as a phenomenon with its own distinctions and multiple expressions. Violence is not always armed. Operationalising the “violence turn” involves enhancing sensitivity to multiple violences in order to avoid reducing peacebuilding to an expanded but still restricted focus on selected expressions of violence which are categorised as either (armed) political or (armed) non-political. The dichotomy between social and political violence can be exaggerated, as acknowledged in the article, and this has implications for how we frame the phenomenon of violence. We need to understand why violence remains such a potent “language” or medium of communication in social and political realms. Violence reduction is a prolonged process which requires a multiplicity of actions across all the spaces of socialisation – from the intimate to the community as well as to the construction of the nation state itself (Pearce 2005). The connections between these are neither self-evident nor inevitable. When violence takes collective forms, its dangers will obviously multiply. However, our willingness to use violence in such forms does not spring from nowhere. Understanding violence as a phenomenon with its own distinctions is a critical task alongside the urgent efforts to deal with its everyday manifestations. This also has implications for building forms of security that do not produce more violence. Peacebuilding can delimit and prioritise its tasks, it will be argued, while remaining alert to the way violences reproduce and mutate in everyday lives, particularly in those of the poorest, as well as differentially across the domains of gender, generation and sexuality