Effectiveness and Emancipation in the Local Turn: Identifying the Essential Features for Local Governance Contributions to Sustainable Peace

In recent peacebuilding literature the exclusion of local actors, their agency as well as context specific circumstances has been referred to as one of the reasons behind centralized, shallow and failed peace. Against this background there is a growing “local turn” in peacebuilding literature arguing for the inclusion of the local to remedy these failures. This paper identifies factors of effective and emancipatory local peacebuilding from previous literature on the local turn. It highlights how these factors complement each other for a more sustainable peace but in some ways build on different ontological assumptions for what peace is and how it is achieved. Acknowledging these differences the paper moves on to discuss a theoretical framework of sub-national factors influencing the sustainability of peace. It argues that the differences embedded in the effective and emancipatory approach to how peace is built is not to be seen as evidence of inaptness of the theoretical framework but as proof for the need to contextualize and problematize local peacebuilding in its local setting.