Summary

This book is a contribution to understanding the potential role of community development in societies impacted by violent conflict. As an introduction to a number of practitioner case studies, it is important to unpack the key concepts of peacebuilding, conflict and community development. Given this, the chapter will focus on community development and peacebuilding. Much has been written about both these approaches, but in the interests of space and time the authors will concentrate on how peacebuilding and community development can interact in circumstances of organised, severe and often protracted violent conflict.

What is violence?

Clearly there are a multiplicity of communities that are impacted by violent conflict in a wide variety of circumstances and conditions. While ‘war’ is conventionally seen as being pursued for political purposes and ‘organised crime’ for economic purposes, the two can often overlap and both invariably entail considerable levels of violence. Political violence is often funded by criminal activity. Criminal violence is often protected by political interests. Who labels a conflict, and how, is a major issue. The designation of ‘terrorist’ is a labelling likely to be conferred by people holding official power. Terminology is important, as are values, when considering both the understanding and practice of community development and peacebuilding in conditions of persistent violent conflict.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, nd) offers a nuanced definition of conflict, setting ‘organised violence’ in the context of a combination of state-based armed conflict, nonstate armed conflict and one-sided violence. With a baseline of a minimum of 25 fatalities (combatants and civilians) in a calendar year, data is presented in terms of inter-state conflict (which is low); intra-state conflict (which at 54 in 2019 was the highest number in the post-1946 period); intrastate conflict that has been internationalised by external intervention (the United States being most involved as the secondary warring partner); and non-state conflict (between non-state armed groups, with Syrian fatalities being surpassed by deaths in Mexico in 2019). Fatalities as a result of civil protests are not included in the Uppsala datasets (Pettersson and Öberg, 2020). Many of the conflicts recorded are localised and regional. This has clear implications for locally based peacebuilding and the community-based strategies involved.