Note from the Author: I am a white woman from the United States working in the field of peacebuilding and I have written this piece to reflect on the intersection of peacebuilding and social justice as well as the responsibility of peacebuilding practitioners from the West when it comes to injustices in our home nations. The “we” referenced throughout this piece refers to this context. This post should not be considered an introductory resource to the Black Lives Matter movement, antiracism, or abolition. If you’re just getting started in understanding the work of organizers and activists in the US in this space, I recommend you start with and maintain focus on the work of Black activists and authors. Here are a few suggestions:

• Antiracism: Selected essays by Ibram X. Kendi

• Intersectionality: Ted Talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw | The #SayHerName Campaign

• Abolition: Selected essays collected by Mariame Kaba

• Institutionalized Racism throughout US History: The 1619 Podcast

A false sense of invincibility and exceptionalism are pervasive throughout the West: we are misguided into thinking that wealth and well established institutions preclude us from the societal and developmental challenges we implement interventions to try to address around the world. As a result, Western peacebuilding practitioners often wind up so focused on the challenges of poverty and conflict “over there” that we forget to consider the similar challenges we face “over here.” Meanwhile, in the US, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement is highlighting the widespread presence of oppressive systems that are stalling development for large contingents of the population.

Our core responsibility as peacebuilding practitioners is to promote positive peace and healthy societies: when people from our own nations are crying out for justice and socio-economic equality, we are obligated to act.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by Police Officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, finally prompting widespread recognition of police brutality and culturally ingrained white supremacy in the US, particularly among a critical mass of white people. This outrage came six years after the Black Lives Matter movement launched in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013. The re-energized protest movement calls for a reckoning with the US’s foundation of systemic racism, legacy and active perpetuation of colonialism, and the impact of these realities on the lives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

In the US, profound inequalities are produced through a wide range of systems of exclusion.

The median net worth for white families is $171,000 compared to $17,150 for Black families [1]. Black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of white people [2] and, according to one analysis, a Black man is 2.5 times more likely than a white man to be killed by a police officer [3]. Across the country 33% of patients hospitalized due to COVID-19 are Black, though only 13.4% of the US population is Black [4]. Those looking to address these injustices are regularly told to make their voices heard at the polls, but voting in the US is routinely harder for Black people [5].

Today’s egregious inequalities can be traced clearly on a continuum through US history: from the earliest colonists pilfering Indigenous lands and subjugating and killing Indigenous peoples, to the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, to Jim Crow era policies that overtly institutionalized exclusion, to the current New Jim Crow era in which, as shown above, similar oppressive circumstances are accomplished covertly through policy that does not name inequality but produces its effect. Recognizing that the US has not yet lived up to its founding ideals of liberty and justice for all, thousands of protesters are on the streets calling out “No justice, no peace.”

Conflict is not inherently bad: conflict is, in fact, a necessary and natural developmental step in the evolution of a society.

As peacebuilding practitioners, particularly those entering the field from a Western perspective, this is one of the earliest and most important lessons we have to learn. When conflicts are squelched through force and fear, peace is technically achieved because violence is absent, but this is a negative peace: it leads to the perpetuation of injustices, unhealthy systems, and it is often short-lived [6]. Conversely, a positive peace is achieved when attitudes, institutions, and structures create and sustain peaceful and just societies [7]. When a peace process results in a positive peace, the conflict is obsolete.

In The End of Policing, a book widely distributed today by activists in the US looking to enhance public understanding of abolitionism, Alex S. Vitale argues that “police primarily exist as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements” [8]. Translated through a peacebuilding lens, Vitale has asserted that police are serving to maintain a negative peace. The cries of the Black Lives Matter movement can therefore be seen as a call to transition from a negative peace to a positive one, to stop attempting to maintain public order through suppression, and instead build an authentically healthy society through equal and just systems. The rallying cry, “No justice, no peace” is therefore tied to a central tenet of peacebuilding and is echoed in movements of civil unrest throughout the world.

Western peace and development actors have been criticized over the years for promoting neocolonialism through their programs.

In Peaceland, Séverine Autesserre describes a Western arrogance that preserves the legacy of colonialism, wherein thematic expertise is valued over local knowledge, which leads to the marginalization of host populations and the implementation of counter-productive programs [9]. Further, in “Emissaries of Empowerment,” Kate Cronin-Furman, Nimmi Gowrinathan, and Rafia Zakaria assert that these paternalistic interventions perpetuate the “white savior / brown victim narrative” [10] and directly mirror the “…visual tableau of the benevolent [colonial] conquerors who had brought enlightenment and order to primitive natives” [11]. These critiques have become widespread from peacebuilding scholars, and as a result innovative social enterprises rooted in the values of local ownership have emerged as a rebuke to the neocolonial approach.

The US has been widely criticized for promoting values abroad that it does not adhere to at home.

Indeed, this neocolonial arrogance can be extrapolated to common critiques of the US’s position in global affairs at large. The US has leveraged its diplomatic, economic, and military might to pressure nations throughout the world to adhere to human rights norms, though its own human rights record is not pristine. The injustices already described throughout this discussion demonstrate profound institutional barriers to US Americans’ ability to access their internationally recognized human rights, including but not limited to: the right to liberty and security of person [12], to equal protection of the law [13], to vote and equal suffrage [14], the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health [15], and to the guarantee of equal enjoyment of these rights without discrimination of any kind, including on the basis of race [16].

While more and more peacebuilding scholars and practitioners have started to work to eliminate neocolonial practice abroad, the Black Lives Matter movement is the most recent indication that Western arrogance and hypocrisy also require attention at home. If we as peacebuilding practitioners from the West continue to try to promote positive peace in the international spaces in which we work without addressing colonialism’s legacies on our own soil, we are reproducing the long-standing global double-standard in miniature.

To fully disengage from our colonial foundations and live the values we work to promote, we must, on an individual basis and organizational level, be just as engaged in transformational processes at home as we are abroad.

The de-colonization of peacebuilding practice will require honest recognition of the places where neocolonial impulses currently exist. On an individual basis we should commit to sustained and rigorous learning, reflection, and action. For the peacebuilding field more broadly, we should grapple with these, and many more, dilemmas inherent in our work: Positive peace and social justice are inextricably linked, so why are peacebuilding enterprises completely absent from the leadership of social justice movements in the US? Why are we so comfortable leading dialogues elsewhere, but are helpless in the face of our own polarization? How can we promote peace abroad with any sense of legitimacy, when we are complicit in injustices at home? Why are we more dedicated to putting out fires next door, even when our own house is burning?

References

[1] Sergio Peçanha, “These Numbers Show That Black and White People Live in Two Different Americas,” The Washington Post, June 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/22/what-numbers-say-whites-blacks-live-two-different-americas/?arc404=true.

[2] “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” NAACP, accessed July 21, 2020, https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/.

[3] Justin Nix, Bradley A. Campbell, Edward H. Byers, Geoffrey P. Alpert, “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015.” Criminology & Public Policy 16 (February 2017): 309-340.

[4] “COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups,” Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Center for Disease Control and Prevention, last modified June 25, 2020, accessed July 21, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html.

[5] Vann R. Newkirk II, “Voter Suppression Is Warping Democracy,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-prri-voter-suppression/565355/.

[6] “An Introduction to Positive Peace,” Vision of Humanity, accessed July 31, 2020, http://visionofhumanity.org/introduction-positive-peace/.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (Brooklyn: Verso: 2017), 45.

[9] Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13.

[10] Kate Cronin-Furman, Nimmi Gowrinathan, and Rafia Zakaria, “Emissaries of Empowerment,” (White Paper, Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, The City College of New York, 2017), 9.

[11] Kate Cronin-Furman, Nimmi Gowrinathan, and Rafia Zakaria, “Emissaries of Empowerment,” (White Paper, Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, The City College of New York, 2017), 6.

[12] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, December 16, 1966, https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx: Article 9, Paragraph 1.

[13] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, December 16, 1966, https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx: Article 24.

[14] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, December 16, 1966, https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx: Article 25, Paragraph (b).

[15] International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, December 16, 1966, https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cescr.aspx: Article 12, Paragraph (c).

[16] International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, December 16, 1966, https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cescr.aspx: Article 2, Paragraph 2.