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Author’s Corner: Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict
March 17, 2023 @ 9:15 am - 10:15 am
| In ‘Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict’ (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Mareike Schomerus sets out a new vision for what international engagement in situations of violent conflict needs to look like. Drawing on ten years of a major research consortium (the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium), which conducted longitudinal empirical multi-method work in eight conflict-affected countries, the book puts a number of bold claims to its critics: it posits that the mental models of stabilization and statebuilding set conflict situations on a never-ending violent path, that economic growth models overlook how social economies really work, that violence can often be the least disruptive element of lives in conflict situations, that the invisible elements of what the author calls ‘the mental landscape’ are the most important parts to pay attention to, and that current understandings of identity and identity-based targeting of populations shies away from a more honest discussion about the burdens of categorisation. Putting into question the past decades of international engagement in conflict situations, it turns on its heads the notion of service delivery to achieve legitimacy and suggests a genuine turn towards more creative cooperation by calling for an empirically-grounded relational approach and a deep questioning of not just the practices of international development, but the underpinning beliefs, imagery, metaphors and ideologies. |
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