Smita Ramnarain

University of Rhode Island, Economics, Faculty Member

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SMITA RAMNARAIN has received her PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She has also completed a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from UMass. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political economy, development, and feminist economics. Her work focuses on the gendered political economy of development in the global South, particularly in South Asia, with a specific focus on post-conflict reconstruction. She is also interested in issues around labor informality, social protection, and the climate adaptation of vulnerable communities. Her work has been published in diverse and interdisciplinary fora such as Feminist Economics, Gender Place & Culture, and the Community Development Journal, and in edited volumes. Since carrying out fieldwork in Nepal for her PhD dissertation, Smita has also been interested in research methodologies within economics, using both qualitative and quantitative methods in her work. Her teaching interests include the political economy of social inequality (race, class, and gender), economic development, the economics of war and peace, and microfinance.
Address: Chafee Hall, Rm 812,
10 Chafee Road, Kingston RI 02881

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Institute for Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana

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Peace and non-violence

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Apr 25, 2023

Since the 1990s, peace and peacebuilding as an active intervention in conflict-affected societies... more Since the 1990s, peace and peacebuilding as an active intervention in conflict-affected societies have been closely integrated with a liberal approach to state-building. The liberal (or neoliberal) peace model emphasizes good governance, law, democracy, development and constitution-building, based on the assumption that democracies tend to be more peaceful. As such, it advocates democratization and market integration as exemplary avenues for conflict resolution and peace (Duffield 2010; Murtagh 2016). This model has come under scrutiny in recent times, as experiences in post-conflict settings have revealed its failures and omissions (see, e.g., Duffield 2010; Pugh 2006). Liberal peacebuilding is subordinated to top-down systems driven by the state or international donors, and largely devoid of local ownership. Peace projects conceived and implemented by external donors/organizations without local input or ownership have created undesirable outcomes, including disenfranchising local populations, sidelining traditional or indigenous practices, and exacerbating inequalities and resentment. Further, peace is defined narrowly as the absence of physical violence and subsumed under a securitized form of state-building. Finally, the liberal model of peacebuilding and reconstruction also comes under scrutiny for its continued espousal of neoliberal and macroeconomic adjustment policies-promoting austerity and the withdrawal of the state from the provision of basic services and social protection-and an emphasis on 'development as usual', provoking questions surrounding who benefits from the development and what is being 'reconstructed' (Pugh 2006; Ramnarain 2013). Countering these failures of top-down, liberal approaches, diverse alternative approaches, ranging from critiques of peace conditionalities to hybrid forms of peacebuilding, community-based development (CBD) and social and solidarity economy (SSE) perspectives have emerged (Ramnarain 2013) (see also entry 16, 'Community-Based Organizations'). Notably, however, the hybrid peace and community-based peacebuilding and development models do not jettison the liberal rubric entirely, but rather make a case for the coexistence of its core norms-security and stabilization, reinforcing states, democratic governance, and marketization-alongside local agency and participatory methods. Therefore, in terms of articulating a transformative or radical alternative to existing peacebuilding paradigms, these frameworks are arguably insufficient. Using case studies from conflict-affected Burundi, Vervisch et al. (2013) argue that the CBD framework-with its overestimation of community homogeneity, translation of local participation into technocratic box-checking and tendency to elite-capture-can be entirely unsuitable for repairing trust and promoting social cohesion. Further, the nature of networks, type and effects of participation, and the kind of resources/ goods distributed, play a critical role in determining the success of community-based peace interventions.

Smita Ramnarain

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