This special section explores the importance of ethnographic research and anthropological framing in understanding the ambivalence of the local in peacebuilding, highlighting the contributions anthropology can make to conflict and peace studies.

Peacebuilding and conceptualisations of the local

Anthropology can contribute to peace and conflict resolution studies by challenging methodology, focusing on peaceful societies, and incorporating gender perspectives.

An Anthropological Contribution to Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies

Anthropology's role in peacebuilding is evolving, with articles on Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and India-Pakistan addressing different aspects of the discipline and broader questions beyond ethnographic fieldwork.

Anthropology & peacebuilding: an introduction

Anthropological approaches and perspectives can be valuable in resolving conflicts at various levels, from religious to political to economic.

Anthropological contributions to conflict resolution

Anthropology demonstrates that humans can live in peaceful, non-warring societies, and judiciously applied anthropology of peace can help reverse modernist assumptions about war, peace, and humanity.

Anthropology: Implications for Peace

Anthropological and ethnographic sensitivity is needed to rescue peacebuilding from neoliberal epistemological frameworks and better understand human dynamics, agency, and hybridity in conflict situations.

Rescuing Peacebuilding? Anthropology and Peace Formation*

Organizational studies can contribute to a better world, but understanding power asymmetry in peacebuilding organizations can be challenging.

Organizing, Researching, and Writing about Peacebuilding from the ‘Wrong’ Side of the Conflict

Everyday encounters between foreign peacebuilders and Solomon Islanders, such as food rejection, can impact non-elite islanders' confidence in long-term peace and their value and status in the modern political economy.

Peacebuilding, foodways and the everyday: a fragile confidence in post-intervention Solomon Islands

Cultural anthropology offers a broad perspective on conflict, examining systems of meaning, ritual, symbolism, language, ethnicity, gender, environmental stress, and sense of place.

Cultural Anthropology Studies of Conflict

Anthropology can enhance Ethnographic Peace Research by promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and allowing for dynamic, multi-sited, and multi-temporal field research, enhancing understanding of complex peace processes and promoting a perspective from below.

Contextualizing Ethnographic Peace Research

Biopolitical insights can help develop a sustainable peace framework that reduces violence and addresses basic human needs in post-conflict environments, addressing endemic cycles of violence.

Biopolitical peacebuilding

Peacebuilding, as an organized activity, shapes and influences people's lives across borders, through organizations and sovereign claims, requiring anthropological perspectives to better understand its effects beyond intended and formalized outcomes.

Understanding Peacebuilding Through Anthropological Perspectives on Organizations and Sovereignty

Interreligious peacebuilding training models can effectively bridge conflict resolution and intercultural communication concepts, but integration and adaptation responses are often rejected due to moral, ethical, and spiritual religious dimensions.

Conflict Resolution, Culture, and Religion: Toward a Training Model of Interreligious Peacebuilding

Islam offers a framework for nonviolence and peacebuilding, emphasizing authentic, indigenous, and local cultural methods to resolve conflicts rather than Western-developed solutions.

A Framework for Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam

Environmental peacebuilding can be a critical tool in post-conflict peacebuilding, but it can also undermine peace efforts if it destabilizes social cohesion, undermines state legitimacy, or produces distributive injustice.

Intrastate environmental peacebuilding: A review of the literature

International peacebuilding strategies can improve the prospects for resolving civil wars by addressing local roots of hostility, local capacities for change, and the specific degree of international commitment available.

International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis

International interveners can contribute to successful local peacebuilding efforts, but must challenge unfounded and detrimental assumptions and identify assumptions that promote effectiveness.

International Peacebuilding and Local Success: Assumptions and Effectiveness

Conflict analysis has great potential for facilitating positive value and social coherence in peacebuilding practices, while identifying complementary problems and limitations.

Conflict analysis in peacebuilding: A review

A holistic approach involving multiple peacemakers, long-term perspectives, and a strong infrastructure can effectively transform conflicts and achieve reconciliation.

Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies

Leadership frameworks can enhance peacebuilding activities by stabilizing and reconstructing national institutions in post-conflict environments.

Leadership: Its Influence on Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding

What are the applications of anthropological insights in conflict resolution and peacebuilding?

These studies suggest that anthropological insights can enhance conflict resolution and peacebuilding by providing ethnographic research, challenging methodologies, incorporating gender perspectives, understanding peaceful societies, and addressing various levels of conflict from religious to political to economic.