Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Introduction
- PART I The Evolution of Humanitarian Interventions in a Global Era
- PART II The Limits of Sovereignty and the Ethics of Interventions
- PART III The Politics of Post-intervention (Re-)Building and Humanitarian Engagement
- 10 (Re-)Building the World: Local Agency and Human Security in the New Millennium
- 11 Who Rebuilds? Local Roles in Rebuilding Shattered Societies
- 12 Transforming the Discourse of Civil-Military Interaction in Humanitarian Environments
- Index
11 - Who Rebuilds? Local Roles in Rebuilding Shattered Societies
from PART III - The Politics of Post-intervention (Re-)Building and Humanitarian Engagement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Introduction
- PART I The Evolution of Humanitarian Interventions in a Global Era
- PART II The Limits of Sovereignty and the Ethics of Interventions
- PART III The Politics of Post-intervention (Re-)Building and Humanitarian Engagement
- 10 (Re-)Building the World: Local Agency and Human Security in the New Millennium
- 11 Who Rebuilds? Local Roles in Rebuilding Shattered Societies
- 12 Transforming the Discourse of Civil-Military Interaction in Humanitarian Environments
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Though many descriptions of peace-building focus on institutions and external interventions, it is local people, not governments or organisations or external interveners, who rebuild their own social ties in the aftermath of destruction. We human beings are social animals. We learn our roles socially (Bandura 1977). When our communities are torn apart, we seek to rebuild them together, socially. When healthy resilient people experience trauma and lose the societal support patterns we rely on, we reimagine and reinvent new ways of engaging with each other. As societies develop over time, and change rapidly during times of extreme disruption, it is clear we cannot return to or recreate the past, rebuilding exactly the same social structures that preceded a crisis. We co-construct our new relationships together in conversation with each other, making meaning together (Harre 1983). Rooted in these understandings of human nature and social relationships, this chapter focuses on the people and partnerships that rebuild shattered societies, and the actions through which they do so, as the local meets the global.
The understandings presented here differ from a state-centric or international-law-based understanding of the process of recovery from war. Societies that have been shattered must rebuild in multifaceted ways, including rebuilding electoral, economic, civil society and the range of social institutions (Paris 2004). Our focus is not on external people, organisations or states intervening to support that rebuilding; others in this book have focused on a variety of forms of external interventions. We focus instead in this chapter on local roles in recovery from disaster, and on local-international partnerships. This is not to discount the roles that external actors can usefully play. Rather, it is to highlight the opportunities for local actors to intervene in their own societies. As such, we ask the fundamental question, ‘who rebuilds?’
In addressing this question, we first look at a case study of rebuilding Georgian–South Ossetian relationships so as to provide both relevant and substantive experiences. By considering who rebuilds shattered societies, we see there is an ongoing process of rebuilding even as minor breakdowns occur.
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- Information
- Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention in the 21st Century , pp. 267 - 286Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017