Agency and the everyday activist

pp. 39-57

in: Oliver P. Richmond, Audra Mitchell (eds), Hybrid forms of peace, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

As the introduction to this volume makes clear, the term "local" is a site of various forms of agency, power and resistance, many of which remain contested. This is partly a result of the looseness of the term, but it is also a result of the limited approach taken to these issues both in the wider international relations discourse and within the narrower liberal peace agenda. The latter may argue for the primacy of the rights of the individual, but in its theoretical reality this individual is an amorphous one, thus ensuring that those elements that may help to define us as individuals, and in turn the way in which these elements are socially constructed and the nature of the agency that we, as human beings, may be able to claim – whether we are male or female, our cultural and ethnic background, our sexuality, our age, or even our occupations – remain both under-researched and under-theorized. The result is an approach that remains narrow and rooted in the notion that human agency is best harnessed and contained with an institutional framework that liberalism propounds.