Autesserre (2021:43): Highlights importance of learning from what works and where peace is maintained, as much as from what doesn’t and where violence occurs.
Autesserre (2021:43-44): Criticises what she calls ‘Peace, Inc’ for focusing on external support and top-down, elite-driven activities. Instead, should be localised, drawing on local processes and cultures and traditions. This doesn’t mean top-down initiatives are not important — because major national-level events can destroy grassroots initiatives. However, peace initiatives need to involve “local leaders, intended beneficiaries, and ordinary citizens.”
Autesserre (2021:61): Sees conflict analysis as an essential part of the peacebuilding process.
Autesserre (2021:66): Effective peacebuilding is not built on outsider knowledge and ideas, transplanted from one conflict zone to another. Rather, it requires the expertise and insights of insiders.
Autesserre (2021:70-72): Criticises Peace, Inc practitioners for conformity in attitudes, behaviours, and strategies, regardless of location. It has a defined language and culture. There is a common attitude of disdaining and denigrating local partners, evoking stereotypes about local populations and cultures. Peacebuilders socialise with other peacebuilders and do not learn local languages, cultures and histories; if they do, they are attacked for ‘going native.’ Organisations prioritise education and work experience in specialised topics, not location-specific learning.
Autesserre (2021:73): “my colleagues and I proudly viewed our work as a highly professional endeavor for which experts were needed. From this perspective, war and poverty are universal issues, rooted in human nature, which is the same everywhere. They are technical problems, too, which can be solved using technocratic solutions based on best practices and a large body of universal, time-tested ideas.”
Autesserre (2021:74): Notes most peacebuilders lack preexisting knowledge of countries or language skills that would enable them to act with local communities. Where peacebuilders do have language or other knowledge, they are deployed to other areas. Host communities also contribute to the divide, treating all foreigners as the same, privileging foreign knowledge, and employing derogatory stereotypes and attitudes. Security procedures increase the divide yet further.
Autesserre (2021:94): Sees most intervention strategies designed around the idea of trickle-down peace: conflicts are between elites, governments, and countries, and if you can resolve these and get elites to stop fighting and bureaucracies to start working, all will be well. Focusing on grassroot tensions is pointless in this model, because the average person is powerless to affect elite relations.
Autesserre (2021:97): This model sees that “all good things come together”: elections, good governance, human rights, separation of powers, free press, education, gender equality, etc. Therefore pursued as a package deal, with a particular focus on elections.
Autesserre (2021:99): Criticises the idea that a six-month or year-long project and a few workshops will somehow create peace. Similarly rejects the focus on “quantifiable results as the gold standard — such data is [viewed as] objective, concrete, and it can be produced with minimal involvement from local populations.”
Autesserre (2021:101): Identifies list of common misperceptions in Peace, Inc approach: • “Specialists’ knowledge is better than local expertise • Outsiders know best • Local people are untrustworthy and incompetent • It’s a good idea to use templates • Only top-down action is needed • Grassroots peacebuilding cannot take place while violence is ongoing • Dialogue is enough and can be a one-off event • The outcome is more important than the process • Peacebuilding is very costly • More money for a program is always a good thing • International efforts should be visible • And peacebuilding can succeed rapidly (in a few months or years).”
Autesserre (2021:103): Democracies are on average more peaceful than nondemocracies, and no two democracies have ever gone to war. Democracies experience few civil wars. But wars are more likely in countries transitioning to democracy, and the greater the shift, the greater the upheaval is likely to be. Gives example of Rwanda, where peace treaty to end civil war culminated in genocide. Democratization also sparked violence in Angola, Congo, former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Central African Republic, El Salvador. Says this was caused by focusing on accelerated process, not underlying conditions that are necessary for that process to be healthy and safe. Elections held quickly increase the likelihood of conflict; elections also decrease the chance of economic recovery.
Autesserre (2021:103): “In brief, the various components of the ‘package deal’ that peacebuilders offer are often in tension with one another. In the short term, there is often a trade-off between democracy and peace (or economic prosperity) in societies emerging from war. Elections can be organized quickly, but doing so may fuel violence. Alternatively, the time, resources, and efforts required to organize elections could be used instead to address the root causes of conflict.” Education and state reconstruction can similarly fuel conflict.
Autesserre (2021:105): Two further problems: local conflict may not mirror national conflict; and national or international peace will not always trickle down to local environment. “A team of leading experts recently assessed how frequently elite bargains end wars. After years of work and in-depth analyses of 21 recent conflicts on different continents, the researchers reached a disheartening conclusion: There is not a single clear-cut example where deals among elites have actually ended violence. Trickle-down peace, it turns out, is just as fraught an ideology as trickle-down economics.”
Autesserre (2021:109): “Bringing attention to bottom-up causes of war does not mean ignoring the impact that elites have on conflict and peace. In many cases, it is because of a combination of local, national, and international issues that violence starts, becomes pervasive, and continues during peace processes and after the signing of peace agreements. National and international leaders often instigate fighting as a way to pursue their own agendas. They manipulate armed groups. They fuel hatred among ordinary people. They launch large-scale attacks that hard thousands of civilians. Thus, the top-down approach that aims to reconcile these elites remains crucial. […] Conflicts must be resolved from the tree-tops and the grassroots.”
[Peace cannot take hold if populations are not prepared for it. Local initiatives can prepare the ground, but also change the national conversation. Where elite framing and local narratives align positively, peace is possible. Where they align negatively, conflict is likely. The question becomes how do local actors bring about alignment when either elite or both is negative? Also, where do diaspora fit into the picture?]
Autesserre (2021:111): Sees elite, top-down preferences as structurally entrenched, but also bought into by professionals who have devoted their lives to it. [My book is a focus on elites, and therefore replicates many of the problems inherent in such an approach. But this is because of the problems in gaining sufficient access to grassroots members. In many cases, accounts that claim to address these through fieldwork are highly problematic, involving very few interviews with actual conflict participants — and for obvious reasons, virtually none with active participants. Instead, some Western researchers lack the language skills required to interrogate questions of ideology, and many accounts stuff their samples with additional people or provide limited insight into their actual approach to interviewing]
Autesserre (2021:148): “Local people have the skills and knowledge necessary to promote peace and uphold the mechanisms, structures, and networks that help to perpetuate it. The resulting ‘peaceful’ societies may not be paradises; conflict is inherent to social life.”
Autesserre (2021:149): “an exclusively top-down strategy leads to disaster. By the same token, an exclusively bottom-up strategy can only produce a very fragile and temporary easement of violence, because manipulation by national leaders, or interference by neighboring armed groups, can jeopardize virtually any local peace. Furthermore, civilians cannot defeat armed groups single-handedly. Nor do ordinary people have the networks necessary to build peace over an entire country. Isolated local successes do not automatically translate into national peace: Certain villages, towns, or regions (like San José de Apartado, Idjwi, and Somaliland) may be peaceful for years while the neighboring areas, and the country itself, remain at war. “It is not that national and international tensions don’t matter — they do — or that national and international peacebuilding is unnecessary — it is. We need to convince the heads of states and rebellions to stop encouraging physical combat and fueling local tensions. We also have to address national and global issues that perpetuate war: discriminatory laws and institutions, arms trade and other economic interests, power struggles on the world stage, etc. In addition to any local initiative, top-down approaches are still very much needed to confront violence.”
Autesserre (2021:149): “only a combination of macro-level and micro-level initiatives can build a sustainable peace. Supporting bottom-up work should not take place at the expense of top-down efforts, precisely because they complement each other.”
Autesserre (2021:157): Cites joke among travellers, anthropologists, and interveners: “‘spend a day in a country, and you’ll write a book about it. Spend a week, and you’ll write an article. Spend a year, and you won’t be able to write even a paragraph, because you’ll realise how much you still don’t understand.’” Argues humility is key for successful interveners.
Autesserre (2021:168-173): Argues outsiders do have an important role to play, a point made by numerous interlocutors when she proposed the idea that outsiders should stop intervening. Outsiders bring vital funding; they share ideas about what has and hasn’t worked elsewhere; and they are able to operate in certain privileged spaces and know how to communicate effectively within them. What is key is allowing locals to decide how best to spend the money, and how to adapt ideas to their own contexts. Outsiders can also provide security by deterring violence through their presence; it also enables them to demonstrate the world cares and thus reinforce local peace initiatives.
Autesserre (2021:173): Locals may be just as corrupt or prejudiced as their elites; and locals may face acute pressures precisely because they come from a community (e.g. giving a job to a relative). Again, outsiders can intervene effectively.
Autesserre (2021:174): Some organisations are “briefcase NGOs,” set up to divert funding but not engaging in any meaningful reconciliation or peace work. Sees insiders as playing a role in identifying “which local groups are worth supporting: which ones are not briefcase NGOs, which ones have legitimate, trained, competent, and honest staff, which ones actually promote peace rather than hatred.”