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Abstract

Over the years, critical studies scholars have criticised liberal peacebuilding strategies for their elitist top-down policies, which hardly pay attention to the local concepts and acts of peace. Critical peace and conflict studies scholars’ advocacy for ‘everyday peace’ comes from negotiated governance, where loosely coordinated processes surpass liberal peace's top-down policies. Therefore, everyday peace recognises people's commentaries and practices shaping their resistance, resilience, and negotiation with conflicting groups. In particular, women and people far from city centres are often marginalised or are not included in peacebuilding efforts. In recognising these people’s limited involvement, this article draws on oral interviews, archival materials, and secondary data with conflict-affected people in some selected study areas in Nigeria’s Middle Belt to understand the dynamics of everyday peace practices. The findings highlight that people in these conflict-affected areas use everyday peace as the hidden script where acts of avoidance, domination, and resistance occur. Naturally, everyday peace has been criticised for emphasising conflict management over resolution. However, this article argues that everyday peace should be examined through the lens of innovation, creativity, and improvision, where citizen agency at the individual and group level takes precedence over state-mandated conflict resolution processes.

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