The local turn in peacebuilding studies represents an explicit and important attempt to transform both the research on and the practice of international peacebuilding. The aim, generally speaking, is to incorporate views, experiences and practices from the Global South and, thereby, overcome the predominance of Northwestern concepts and templates in the practice and scholarship of international peace operations.
In his PRIF Working Paper, Jonas Wolff empirically assesses this attempt by systematically analyzing the existing scholarship that represents the local turn in peacebuilding.
He addresses three questions:
- In how far do scholars that aim at giving agency and ownership to “the locals” rethink their own concepts and normative premises?
- To what extent they do so by incorporating views and approaches from the Global South?
- To what extent and in what ways scholars from the Global South are an active and relevant part of this scholarly debate?
The full working paper is available for download here: Wolff, Jonas (2022): The local turn and the Global South in critical peacebuilding studies, PRIF Working Papers No. 57, Frankfurt/M.