Despite deep roots in local community organizing and peace
activism, the peacebuilding field over the past two decades has
evolved into a stratified, and often disconnected, community of
academics, policymakers, and practitioners. While the growth into a
more recognized and professionalized field has led to significant
improvements in how decision-makers and influential thinkers accept
peace and conflict resolution theory and practice, it has also left
certain communities behind. Individual activists, community-based
groups, and locally-led civil society organizations - in other
words, the people most directly experiencing the results of violent
conflict and striving to overcome and transform it - remain notably
on the margins of what has become the more recognized
"international peacebuilding field." As a result, the inherent
links between policies and practices of the global North,
particularly the United States, where much of the professional
peacebuilding community is concentrated, and the daily realities of
rising violence and collapsing order experienced by communities in
the global South, are glossed over or apportioned to the fields of
political science or international affairs. Similarly, the daily
community level efforts of people and groups within the United
States and other global North countries seeking to address drivers
of violence and injustice in their own communities are largely
disconnected from the struggles of communities living inside
recognized war zones for a more peaceful and just future. These
disconnects within the peacebuilding field have increasingly become
obstacles to its further evolution and improvement. Without a
serious shift in direction toward more integrated, interconnected,
and intersectional understanding and approaches, the peacebuilding
field threatens to become just another Western-driven industry in
which powerful decision-makers, politicized funding, and large
international bureaucracies sustain themselves. Reconnecting the
field with its roots of community-based activism, organizing, and
courageous leadership is urgently needed, and a necessary step to
improving our collective efforts to build a more peaceful, just,
and sustainable world. Drawing on the voices and experiences of
community-based peace leaders around the world, this book envisions
a new way of working together as a truly local and global
peacebuilding field - one in which undoing the roots of violence
and injustice is not something that takes place "in the field", but
in the streets of our own neighborhoods and in solidarity with
others around the world.
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