Samantha Ruppel's dissertation “Locally Based Civil Conflict Transformation Between Partnership and Power Imbalance” from 2023 has now been published in English translation.
The joint management of conflicts by local and international actors has a long tradition in German peace work and is becoming increasingly important in a globalized world. The peace processes of recent years have shown that they can only be successful if local actors are actively involved. However, cooperation is often characterized by dependencies and power imbalances. While research to date has focused primarily on the relationship between local actors and the United Nations or other military interventions, a systematic analysis of the partnership approach to cooperation has been lacking. To what extent does civilian peace work, conceived as a partnership, succeed in living up to its claim? And to what extent is cooperation in civilian conflict management characterized by power asymmetries?
To address this gap, Samantha Ruppel’s monograph “Locally Based Civil Conflict Transformation Between Partnership and Power Imbalance” looks at Civil Peace Service projects in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The book explores the question, relevant to both academia and peace practitioners, of the extent to which there can be an equal partnership in the context of civilian conflict management. By centering the work on the opportunities and challenges of collaboration, it succeeds in focusing on the day-to-day activities, analyzing the actual processes and frictions of peace work, and making a valuable contribution to critical peace studies and the discussion of hybridity and friction.
The book has been published in the series “Contributions to International Relations” by Springer-Verlag. It is available as an open access publication on the Springer-Verlag website.