Gearoid Millar
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 86810 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Gearoid Millar |
| PRENOMES | Gearoid |
| SOBRENOME | Millar |
| ASSINATURA | MILLAR G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Aberdeen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0069-9742 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 306 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2010 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Rethinking peace in turbulent times
With considerable flux in the peace and conflict landscape, scholars, policymakers, practitioners and publics alike are scrambling to understand emerging realities. Moreover, a sometimes slow academic publishing cycle means that much material appearing in academic journals seems already outdated–reporting on a peace and conflict landscape as though we are still in an era of comprehensive peace processes and peace accords. In an effort to shed som…
Participatory action research in neoliberal academia
Participatory action research (PAR) is described in the literature as a valuable method for enhancing the power of marginalized individuals and communities by collectively producing knowledge to transform the inequalities they experience. This deviates from most social science research, where such actors are largely the subjects of data extraction. This paper reports on our experience of using PAR to examine existing food systems and ideas regard…
Just food transitions
In this paper we apply the concept of just transition to food systems, a domain central to environmental sustainability and social justice. We broaden and democratise the just transition debate by foregrounding a new set of voices and experiences from civil society organisations and networks in Brazil, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and Zambia. We analyse the understandings of just food system transition as voiced in participatory exchanges be…
Responding to “The Greats”
In his two articles 'On the Greats and Peace' Oliver P. Richmond outlines the long development of political theories that underpin what he calls the International Peace Architecture, or IPA. The ideas presented, he argues, have given rise to and are embodied in the institutions and practices of international security and peace. However, these ideas, institutions, and practices are, he notes, ill-suited to respond to many of the contemporary chall…
Trans-Scalar Ethnographic Peace Research
Dynamics of peace and conflict emerge in the complex non-linear circulation of influence across scales, from the local to the global and back. Recently proposed methodologies for examining these dynamics, whether quantitative (primarily focusing on the macro), or qualitative (primarily focusing on the micro), are distinctly limited. Both struggle to trace influences across the full range of scales, and neither incorporates mechanisms to examine t…
The Power of Narratives in Conflict and Peace
Presenting original data from interviews conducted in Iraq between 2013 and 2019, this paper charts the evolution of conflict related narratives of the ‘other’ among members of the Sunni confession immediately prior to, during, and after the rise and fall of the Islamic State (IS). It charts the evolution of these narratives through three escalatory phases (victimhood narratives, divisive narratives, and violent narratives) and three de-escalator…
Coordinated ethnographic peace research
Post-conflict interventions are often promoted for their presumed positive long-term influence on peace and justice. Concerns linger, however, that they can also let the state off the hook by replacing, and thereby undermining, its capacity over time. Unfortunately, scholarly research assessing the long-term influence of post-conflict interventions is rare, and practitioner evaluations are primarily short-term processes regarding individual, temp…
Ambition and ambivalence
For 50 years positive peace has served as an aspirational goal for many scholars and practitioners of peace. However, much recent scholarly literature evidences a substantial ambivalence toward this ambition, suggesting that prominent theories, policies and practices in the field have failed to support positive peace. This article argues that a key reason for this shortcoming is the field's failure to respond adequately to the evolving character …
Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research
Preserving the everyday
Quite a lot of recent peacebuilding scholarship has deployed the concept of ‘the everyday’. In an extension of the local turn’s emphasis on agency and resistance, much of this scholarship interprets the everyday as inherently a site of politics. It does so either by interpreting every act (no matter how motivated) as an agentic political act, or by equating agentic political acts (at the local level) with the quotidian activities which define the…
Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research
Hidden Interactions in the Economics of Peace and Conflict
Toward a trans-scalar peace system
Peacebuilding scholarship has not responded adequately to critiques of peacebuilding practice. This failure results from two related problems; an implicit assumption of a dichotomous relationship between conflict and peace, and an attendant failure to appreciate the challenges posed by complex global conflict systems. Stuck debating the dynamics of specific interventions in single states, the field has failed to fully appreciate how much conflict…
Ethnographic Peace Research
Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research
As has been thoroughly rehearsed in the literature, the failures of the liberal peace model of post-conflict intervention have given rise to a ‘local turn’ in peace research. This in turn has refocused attention away from the motivations and practices of international actors towards local ownership and ‘buy-in’, and the importance of culture, context, and ‘the Everyday’. There is a mismatch, however, between the methodological skills among peace …
Decentring the intervention experts
The failures of peace interventions are often associated with their exogenously conceived and technocratic nature, which discount complexity within and diversity between post-conflict contexts. In response, scholars have resorted to concepts of empowerment, resistance, hybridity and friction to refocus post-conflict policymaking away from 'top-down' and towards 'bottom-up' processes. Any such efforts, however, require that policymakers understand…
Ethnographic Peace Research
While Peace Studies has always incorporated different research methodologies, large-N quantitative methods and state-level findings have dominated the literature and had most influence on policy and practice. Today, however, the limitations of peace interventions are commonly identified with the institutional, state-centric, and technocratic approaches associated with such limited understandings and their resultant policies. This paper argues, th…
Co-opting Authority and Privatizing Force in Rural Africa
Large-scale land investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa have received substantial criticism for their negative local impacts, but few studies discuss specifically their application of corporate power on the ground. This article provides an examination of such application in rural Sierra Leone. The article describes how one corporation both directly and indirectly co-opted authority and privatized force in order to wield power over the land and…
Post-Liberal Peace Transitions
In this volume Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda introduce the concept of Peace Formation to theorise about how peace may emerge through the ‘interplay of forces’ engaged in post-conflict conte
Peacebuilding and Friction
Introduction: Peacebuilding through the lens of friction, Annika Bjorkdahl, Kristine Hoglund, Gearold Millar, Jair van der Lijn, and Willemijn Verkoren 1. Frictional spaces: Transitional justice between the global and the local, Susanne Buckley Zistel 2. Respecting complexity: Compound friction and unpredictability in peacebuilding, Gearoid Millar 3. Frictional commemoration. Local agency and cosmopolitan politics at memorial sites in Bosnia-Herz…
Disciplinary Divides in Post-Conflict Justice and Peace
Peer reviewed
For whom do local peace processes function? Maintaining control through conflict management
Recent peacebuilding literature provides a sustained critique of externally designed conflict management processes and promotes instead local mechanisms. Such mechanisms, it is argued, will provide more ownership and agency to local actors and, thus, a more sustainable peace. But while there are many examples of local conflict management institutions, and many discussions of the hybrid outcomes of interaction between the global and local, the lit…
Local experiences of liberal peace
Over the past 20 years scholars have repeatedly highlighted the complex relationship between conflict, peace and economics. It is today accepted that economic factors at the global, regional, national and local levels can promote conflict in various ways and that economic factors are therefore central in establishing a sustainable post-conflict peace. However, while the scholarly literature includes much nuance regarding the precise nature of the…
Knowledge and Control in the Contemporary Land Rush
Substantial media and academic attention has recently focused on changing patterns of land control in the 'Global South', wherein foreign governments and corporations seek to control land for food, fuel and feed production. Recent scholarship describes such projects as symptomatic of a broader liberalization of global governance. However, few studies investigate how such liberal governance is applied on the ground in host countries. This paper fi…
We Have No Voice for That”
Assessing Local Experiences of Truth-Telling in Sierra Leone
1 This article presents findings from a qualitative case study assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone. It contributes to the empirical evidence concerning the psychologically healing effects of postwar truth telling processes and adds significantly to the specificity of such findings. The article distinguishes between the experiences of truth telling among the educated elite minority and the majority of local …
Ethnographic Peace Research
While Peace Studies has always incorporated different research methodologies, large-N quantitative methods and state-level findings have dominated the literature and had most influence on policy and practice. Today, however, the limitations of peace interventions are commonly identified with the institutional, state-centric, and technocratic approaches associated with such limited understandings and their resultant policies. This paper argues, th…
Peacebuilding Plans and Local Reconfigurations
What happens when global meets local? This special issue focuses on the dynamic interaction between externally conceived plans for peacebuilding intervention and local people's own approaches and strategies. The notion of ‘friction’ provides a perspective that acknowledges the unpredictable and unexpected nature of this interaction. The ‘hybrid’ outcomes of such dynamic interactions can vary in extent and success, as peacebuilding plans are rerou…
Disaggregating hybridity
The term 'hybrid' has been widely incorporated into recent peacebuilding scholarship to describe an array of peacebuilding endeavors, including hybrid peacekeeping missions, hybrid criminal tribunals, hybrid governance, and the hybrid peace. However, while widely deployed, hybridity itself is under-theorized and variably applied by scholars. Major concerns arise, therefore, concerning the concept's usefulness for peacebuilding theory, policy, and…
Between Western theory and local practice
Although truth commissions are thought to provide healing and justice in postwar situations, some scholars worry that such mechanisms emerge from Western theories that may be inapplicable in many cultural settings. Based on an ethnographic study of local experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, this article describes how local cultural dynamics determine whether truth-telling is experienced as predicted by peacebui…
Expectations and Experiences of Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
This article investigates local experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone and explains how these experiences were influenced by the parallel administration of many peacebuilding processes. Using qualitative data it shows how the goals and procedures of these various processes overlapped and interacted in the imaginations of local people, generated unpredicted expectations, and eventually led to negative experiences o…
For whom do local peace processes function? Maintaining control through conflict management
Recent peacebuilding literature provides a sustained critique of externally designed conflict management processes and promotes instead local mechanisms. Such mechanisms, it is argued, will provide more ownership and agency to local actors and, thus, a more sustainable peace. But while there are many examples of local conflict management institutions, and many discussions of the hybrid outcomes of interaction between the global and local, the lit…
Preserving the everyday
Quite a lot of recent peacebuilding scholarship has deployed the concept of ‘the everyday’. In an extension of the local turn’s emphasis on agency and resistance, much of this scholarship interprets the everyday as inherently a site of politics. It does so either by interpreting every act (no matter how motivated) as an agentic political act, or by equating agentic political acts (at the local level) with the quotidian activities which define the…
Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone
This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in rural Sierra Leone. It adds to the sparse literature directly evaluating local experiences of transitional justice mechanisms. It investigates the conceptual foundations of retributive and restorative approaches to postwar justice, and describes the emerging alternative argument demanding attention be paid to economic, cultural, and so…
Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research
As has been thoroughly rehearsed in the literature, the failures of the liberal peace model of post-conflict intervention have given rise to a ‘local turn’ in peace research. This in turn has refocused attention away from the motivations and practices of international actors towards local ownership and ‘buy-in’, and the importance of culture, context, and ‘the Everyday’. There is a mismatch, however, between the methodological skills among peace …
Knowledge and Control in the Contemporary Land Rush
Substantial media and academic attention has recently focused on changing patterns of land control in the 'Global South', wherein foreign governments and corporations seek to control land for food, fuel and feed production. Recent scholarship describes such projects as symptomatic of a broader liberalization of global governance. However, few studies investigate how such liberal governance is applied on the ground in host countries. This paper fi…
Investing in peace
In peace-building and transitional justice literature economic restoration is considered central to sustainable peace in post-conflict societies. However, it is also widely recognised that many post-conflict states cannot afford mechanisms to provide restoration. Not only are many such states poor to begin with, but violent conflict further degrades their economic capacity. As a result, in their need to provide jobs, generate tax revenues, spur d…
Toward a trans-scalar peace system
Peacebuilding scholarship has not responded adequately to critiques of peacebuilding practice. This failure results from two related problems; an implicit assumption of a dichotomous relationship between conflict and peace, and an attendant failure to appreciate the challenges posed by complex global conflict systems. Stuck debating the dynamics of specific interventions in single states, the field has failed to fully appreciate how much conflict…
Local experiences of liberal peace
Over the past 20 years scholars have repeatedly highlighted the complex relationship between conflict, peace and economics. It is today accepted that economic factors at the global, regional, national and local levels can promote conflict in various ways and that economic factors are therefore central in establishing a sustainable post-conflict peace. However, while the scholarly literature includes much nuance regarding the precise nature of the…
Trans-Scalar Ethnographic Peace Research
Dynamics of peace and conflict emerge in the complex non-linear circulation of influence across scales, from the local to the global and back. Recently proposed methodologies for examining these dynamics, whether quantitative (primarily focusing on the macro), or qualitative (primarily focusing on the micro), are distinctly limited. Both struggle to trace influences across the full range of scales, and neither incorporates mechanisms to examine t…
We Have No Voice for That”
Our brothers who went to the bush
A number of distinct subfields within conflict resolution share foundational theories and emerge from similar understandings of social conflict. One of the most influential of these theories assumes that conflict environments give rise to 'otherizing' dynamics between competing groups. This theory assumes that conflict occurs between and further reifies identity groups. It follows from this theory that conflict resolution practice, and particular…
Co-opting Authority and Privatizing Force in Rural Africa
Large-scale land investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa have received substantial criticism for their negative local impacts, but few studies discuss specifically their application of corporate power on the ground. This article provides an examination of such application in rural Sierra Leone. The article describes how one corporation both directly and indirectly co-opted authority and privatized force in order to wield power over the land and…
Disciplinary Divides in Post-Conflict Justice and Peace
Peer reviewed
Performative memory and re-victimization
In transitional justice and peacebuilding literature, the presentation of traumatic memory is thought to be predictably socially generative of healing, reconciliation, and justice. In rural Sierra Leone, however, the truth-telling performances of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were commonly experienced as provocative and as providing “no good thing.” This article explains this phenomenon by demonstrating how truth-telling in this case ge…
Ah lef ma case fo God”
This article describes a qualitative ethnographic analysis of local experiences of truth-telling performances within Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Whereas proponents of truth commissions claim that such processes promote postwar reconciliation, this study found that local religious belief impeded such effects. While belief did enhance the local willingness to reconcile, in tandem with postwar insecurity, it also promoted a r…
Participatory action research in neoliberal academia
Participatory action research (PAR) is described in the literature as a valuable method for enhancing the power of marginalized individuals and communities by collectively producing knowledge to transform the inequalities they experience. This deviates from most social science research, where such actors are largely the subjects of data extraction. This paper reports on our experience of using PAR to examine existing food systems and ideas regard…
The Power of Narratives in Conflict and Peace
Presenting original data from interviews conducted in Iraq between 2013 and 2019, this paper charts the evolution of conflict related narratives of the ‘other’ among members of the Sunni confession immediately prior to, during, and after the rise and fall of the Islamic State (IS). It charts the evolution of these narratives through three escalatory phases (victimhood narratives, divisive narratives, and violent narratives) and three de-escalator…
Ambition and ambivalence
For 50 years positive peace has served as an aspirational goal for many scholars and practitioners of peace. However, much recent scholarly literature evidences a substantial ambivalence toward this ambition, suggesting that prominent theories, policies and practices in the field have failed to support positive peace. This article argues that a key reason for this shortcoming is the field's failure to respond adequately to the evolving character …
Decentring the intervention experts
The failures of peace interventions are often associated with their exogenously conceived and technocratic nature, which discount complexity within and diversity between post-conflict contexts. In response, scholars have resorted to concepts of empowerment, resistance, hybridity and friction to refocus post-conflict policymaking away from 'top-down' and towards 'bottom-up' processes. Any such efforts, however, require that policymakers understand…
Assessing Local Experiences of Truth-Telling in Sierra Leone
1 This article presents findings from a qualitative case study assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone. It contributes to the empirical evidence concerning the psychologically healing effects of postwar truth telling processes and adds significantly to the specificity of such findings. The article distinguishes between the experiences of truth telling among the educated elite minority and the majority of local …
Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone
This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in rural Sierra Leone. It adds to the sparse literature directly evaluating local experiences of transitional justice mechanisms. It investigates the conceptual foundations of retributive and restorative approaches to postwar justice, and describes the emerging alternative argument demanding attention be paid to economic, cultural, and so…
Between Western theory and local practice
Although truth commissions are thought to provide healing and justice in postwar situations, some scholars worry that such mechanisms emerge from Western theories that may be inapplicable in many cultural settings. Based on an ethnographic study of local experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, this article describes how local cultural dynamics determine whether truth-telling is experienced as predicted by peacebui…
Ah lef ma case fo God”
This article describes a qualitative ethnographic analysis of local experiences of truth-telling performances within Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Whereas proponents of truth commissions claim that such processes promote postwar reconciliation, this study found that local religious belief impeded such effects. While belief did enhance the local willingness to reconcile, in tandem with postwar insecurity, it also promoted a r…
Our brothers who went to the bush
A number of distinct subfields within conflict resolution share foundational theories and emerge from similar understandings of social conflict. One of the most influential of these theories assumes that conflict environments give rise to 'otherizing' dynamics between competing groups. This theory assumes that conflict occurs between and further reifies identity groups. It follows from this theory that conflict resolution practice, and particular…
Peacebuilding Plans and Local Reconfigurations
What happens when global meets local? This special issue focuses on the dynamic interaction between externally conceived plans for peacebuilding intervention and local people's own approaches and strategies. The notion of ‘friction’ provides a perspective that acknowledges the unpredictable and unexpected nature of this interaction. The ‘hybrid’ outcomes of such dynamic interactions can vary in extent and success, as peacebuilding plans are rerou…
Expectations and Experiences of Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
This article investigates local experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone and explains how these experiences were influenced by the parallel administration of many peacebuilding processes. Using qualitative data it shows how the goals and procedures of these various processes overlapped and interacted in the imaginations of local people, generated unpredicted expectations, and eventually led to negative experiences o…
An Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding
Introduction Part 1: Introduction to the Ethnographic Approach 1. Peacebuilding, Empowerment, and Evaluation 2. Historical, Political, and Social Context Part 2: The Four Pillars of the Ethnographic Approach 3. Peacebuilding as Experiential 4. Ethnographic Preparation 5. Local Engagement 6. Appraisal of One's Own Implicit Assumptions Part 3: The Details and Challenges of Incorporating the Ethnographic Approach 7. Challenges to the Ethnographic Ap…
An Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding
This book aims to outline and promote an ethnographic approach to evaluating international peacebuilding interventions in transitional states. While the evaluation of peacebuilding and transitional justice efforts has been a growing concern in recent years, too often evaluations assess projects based on locally irrelevant measures, reinforce the status quo distribution of power in transitional situations, and uncritically accept the implicit conc…
Performative memory and re-victimization
In transitional justice and peacebuilding literature, the presentation of traumatic memory is thought to be predictably socially generative of healing, reconciliation, and justice. In rural Sierra Leone, however, the truth-telling performances of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were commonly experienced as provocative and as providing “no good thing.” This article explains this phenomenon by demonstrating how truth-telling in this case ge…
Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding
Disaggregating hybridity
The term 'hybrid' has been widely incorporated into recent peacebuilding scholarship to describe an array of peacebuilding endeavors, including hybrid peacekeeping missions, hybrid criminal tribunals, hybrid governance, and the hybrid peace. However, while widely deployed, hybridity itself is under-theorized and variably applied by scholars. Major concerns arise, therefore, concerning the concept's usefulness for peacebuilding theory, policy, and…
We Have No Voice for That”
Investing in peace
In peace-building and transitional justice literature economic restoration is considered central to sustainable peace in post-conflict societies. However, it is also widely recognised that many post-conflict states cannot afford mechanisms to provide restoration. Not only are many such states poor to begin with, but violent conflict further degrades their economic capacity. As a result, in their need to provide jobs, generate tax revenues, spur d…
Peacebuilding and Friction
Introduction: Peacebuilding through the lens of friction, Annika Bjorkdahl, Kristine Hoglund, Gearold Millar, Jair van der Lijn, and Willemijn Verkoren 1. Frictional spaces: Transitional justice between the global and the local, Susanne Buckley Zistel 2. Respecting complexity: Compound friction and unpredictability in peacebuilding, Gearoid Millar 3. Frictional commemoration. Local agency and cosmopolitan politics at memorial sites in Bosnia-Herz…
Disciplinary Divides in Post-Conflict Justice and Peace
Peer reviewed
For whom do local peace processes function? Maintaining control through conflict management
Recent peacebuilding literature provides a sustained critique of externally designed conflict management processes and promotes instead local mechanisms. Such mechanisms, it is argued, will provide more ownership and agency to local actors and, thus, a more sustainable peace. But while there are many examples of local conflict management institutions, and many discussions of the hybrid outcomes of interaction between the global and local, the lit…
Local experiences of liberal peace
Over the past 20 years scholars have repeatedly highlighted the complex relationship between conflict, peace and economics. It is today accepted that economic factors at the global, regional, national and local levels can promote conflict in various ways and that economic factors are therefore central in establishing a sustainable post-conflict peace. However, while the scholarly literature includes much nuance regarding the precise nature of the…
Knowledge and Control in the Contemporary Land Rush
Substantial media and academic attention has recently focused on changing patterns of land control in the 'Global South', wherein foreign governments and corporations seek to control land for food, fuel and feed production. Recent scholarship describes such projects as symptomatic of a broader liberalization of global governance. However, few studies investigate how such liberal governance is applied on the ground in host countries. This paper fi…
Post-Liberal Peace Transitions
In this volume Oliver P. Richmond and Sandra Pogodda introduce the concept of Peace Formation to theorise about how peace may emerge through the ‘interplay of forces’ engaged in post-conflict conte
Ethnographic Peace Research
Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research
As has been thoroughly rehearsed in the literature, the failures of the liberal peace model of post-conflict intervention have given rise to a ‘local turn’ in peace research. This in turn has refocused attention away from the motivations and practices of international actors towards local ownership and ‘buy-in’, and the importance of culture, context, and ‘the Everyday’. There is a mismatch, however, between the methodological skills among peace …
Decentring the intervention experts
The failures of peace interventions are often associated with their exogenously conceived and technocratic nature, which discount complexity within and diversity between post-conflict contexts. In response, scholars have resorted to concepts of empowerment, resistance, hybridity and friction to refocus post-conflict policymaking away from 'top-down' and towards 'bottom-up' processes. Any such efforts, however, require that policymakers understand…
Ethnographic Peace Research
While Peace Studies has always incorporated different research methodologies, large-N quantitative methods and state-level findings have dominated the literature and had most influence on policy and practice. Today, however, the limitations of peace interventions are commonly identified with the institutional, state-centric, and technocratic approaches associated with such limited understandings and their resultant policies. This paper argues, th…
Co-opting Authority and Privatizing Force in Rural Africa
Large-scale land investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa have received substantial criticism for their negative local impacts, but few studies discuss specifically their application of corporate power on the ground. This article provides an examination of such application in rural Sierra Leone. The article describes how one corporation both directly and indirectly co-opted authority and privatized force in order to wield power over the land and…
Political science (29 obras) · Peacebuilding and International Security (26 obras) · Sociology (26 obras) · Political Conflict and Governance (22 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Peacebuilding (17 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Cambodian History and Society (13 obras) · Political economy (13 obras) · Economics (10 obras)