Comments on Strategic Peacebuilding from Below

When I first started using this term I focused it on people who were working at the grassroots level, mostly INGOs and indigenous NGOs working in peacebuilding locally. The difficulty I found time and again was a phenomenon I referred to as “bottom-bottom” change, that is good work done locally in ways that did not necessarily translate into wider social change. My concern generally is both the remaining invisibility of the local community in both elite driven peace processes and state-centered radar system incapable of understanding or even seeing things already happening and affected but rarely included in processes of change. The single biggest gap we face remains that distance and lack of relationship between the grassroots and elite processes. I work a lot with the local community. I find consistently I must help them think about how to be more strategic in what they do as it relates to the question of promoting wider social change of which they are a part and which they must help promote. The question I pose is simple and very complex: How does wider constructive change happen?…