Everyday peace in the Ninewa Plains, Iraq: Culture, rituals, and community interactions
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00108367231177797 |
| Author | Amal Bourhrous,Dylan O’Driscoll |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367231177797
Cooperation and Conflict
2023, Vol. 58(4) 542 –560
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367231177797
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Everyday peace in the Ninewa
Plains, Iraq: Culture, rituals,
and community interactions
Amal Bourhrous and Dylan O’Driscoll
Abstract
Although the need for local ownership of peacebuilding is routinely emphasized, the importance
and the modalities of engaging with local cultures and traditions are not adequately understood,
and the peacebuilding potential of local customs remains largely unharnessed. Drawing on
extensive interviews with community leaders (n94) and farmers and villagers (n107), and using
a conceptual framework that combines notions of the everyday and events that mark a rupture
with the everyday, this article explores the opportunities that local people’s everyday interactions,
culture, and traditions offer for peacebuilding in post-Islamic State Ninewa Plains, Iraq. In doing
so, the article makes a theoretical contribution to the everyday peace literature by further
developing existing typologies of everyday acts and attitudes of everyday peace. Demonstrating
how everyday acts and attitudes of peace sit on a scale with negative peace on the one end and
positive peace on the other, the article introduces the concept of ‘affinity’ on the positive peace
side of the scale, to refer to an affective engagement with the other and to acts of getting to
know, understand, and participate in what is important to the other community.
Keywords
affinity, culture, everyday, Iraq, local peace, rituals
Introduction
Recent years have witnessed a growing emphasis on local peacebuilding among scholars
and practitioners as part of what has come to be known as the ‘local turn’ in peacebuild-
ing (Campbell, 2018; Firchow, 2018; Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015; Mac Ginty and
Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015; Simangan, 2020). This interest in local dynamics
came as a critique of the dominant ‘liberal peace’ model as a one-size-fits-all package of
top-down interventions broadly geared towards state-building, democratization, and
Corresponding author:
Dylan O’Driscoll, Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR), Coventry University, Coventry,
CV1 2TL, UK.
Email: odriscoll.dylan@yahoo.com
1177797CAC0010.1177/00108367231177797Cooperation and ConflictBourhrous and O’Driscoll
research-article2023
Article
Bourhrous and O’Driscoll 543
economic liberalization (Finkenbusch, 2021). However, despite a markedly stronger
interest in local dynamics, local approaches continue to be relegated to the margins of
peacebuilding efforts. International peacebuilding actors largely remain reluctant to gen-
uinely engage with local actors and allow them to drive and shape peacebuilding pro-
cesses according to their own visions and needs. Although many international actors
routinely emphasize the need for local participation in and ownership of peacebuilding
processes, oftentimes this fails to go beyond rhetoric, reflecting an instrumental use of
the discourse of localism (Campbell, 2018). There seems to be a limited understanding
of what the ‘local’ really means and what it entails on the ground (Paffenholz, 2014). The
importance and the modalities of engaging with local cultures and traditions, in particu-
lar, are not adequately understood, and the peacebuilding potential of traditional knowl-
edge and local customs remains largely unharnessed (Boege, 2011).
This article explores the opportunities that local people’s everyday interactions, cul-
ture, and traditions offer for building peaceful relations and strengthening social cohe-
sion between ethnic and religious communities in post-Islamic State (IS) Ninewa Plains
in northwestern Iraq. In particular, the article examines the peacebuilding potential of
local commercial exchanges and farming practices, local produce and cooking traditions,
as well as local ethnic and religious celebrations and rituals. For this purpose, the article
adopts a conceptual framework that considers both everyday interactions and events
(such as rituals) that often are experienced as a break with the everyday, inasmuch as
both are part of the concrete lives of ordinary people, and both offer important opportuni-
ties for peacebuilding. The article builds on existing typologies of acts and attitudes of
everyday peace, but also adds to these by introducing the concept of affinity to refer to
an affective engagement with the other and to acts of getting to know, understand, and
participate in what is important to the other community. This allows for a better account
of how everyday interactions, culture and traditions can contribute to positive peace, and
how peacebuilders can draw on this in developing more locally attuned peacebuilding
initiatives. In doing so, this article makes a theoretical contribution to the everyday, and
broader, peace literature, specifically on understandings of positive everyday peace.
The article proceeds as follows. It first describes the methodology and discusses ethnic
and cultural diversity in Ninewa and the history of violence and persecution that minori-
ties have endured. Next, the article engages with the debates on local peacebuilding and
the intricacies of mobilizing culture and traditions in peacebuilding processes. It then
constructs the conceptual framework, which incorporates both everyday interactions and
what marks a rupture with the everyday, as well as introduces the concept of affinity as a
supplement to existing typologies of acts and attitudes of everyday peace. The article then
presents the empirical findings of cultural and traditional practices in Ninewa and uses the
typology developed to discuss how these practices can contribute to inter-community
relations and positive peace. Finally, the article concludes by summarizing empirical and
theoretical findings and highlighting their practical relevance for peacebuilding.
Methods
This article draws on extensive semi-structured interviews with community leaders
(n94) and farmers and villagers (n107) conducted between May 2020 and April 2021.1
The participants received a detailed information sheet about the project, and the consent
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