Bringing the Local Back In: Haiti, Local Governance and the Dynamics of Vertically Integrated Peacebuilding

In recent years, ‘the local’ has moved to the forefront of the contemporary peacebuilding debate, as evidenced both by growing scholarly interest in ‘the local turn’ in peacebuilding and by the emphasis on legitimate, inclusive politics in policy discussions surrounding the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States. What is less clear, however, is how community-level peacebuilding activities can be effectively integrated with longstanding efforts to build peace by building viable, accountable state-level institutions; there remains, in other words, a conceptual and empirical gap between top-down and bottom-up peacebuilding processes. This article draws upon a case study of community-level peacebuilding and violence reduction in the urban slums of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince to illustrate the importance of vertical integration for sustainable peacebuilding. It argues that in the absence of explicit linkage — in particular through local-level institutions of governance — with broader statebuilding processes, community-based peacebuilding efforts may ultimately prove to be more palliative than transformative.