Power Takes, Take Power: On the Ontological Foundations of Peacebuilding

There is ample evidence that the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) has come to a deadlock. Recent turns within peace research towards critical approaches to peacebuilding, as opposed to the liberal peace paradigm, acknowledge the failure of state-oriented practices and advocate for, more or less sophisticated, attempts to capture the local dimension of peacebuilding. In these terms, the focus is on the emancipatory capacity of local agents: individuals, social groups and NGOs. Yet, the actual stagnation and apparent powerlessness of these locally owned practices symptomize the complexity of local peacebuilding and characterize it as an antagonistic process. Evidences from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) indicate that different forms and mechanisms of soft power, and the ways they diffuse, account for the dialectical and political nature of peacebuilding and need to be addressed within peace research. In particular, in the context of a weak or absent state, the degree of local actors' agency in terms of soft power practice, i.e. public diplomacy, assumes substantial relevance. This papers, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork , aims to shed light and contribute to critical peace studies by emphasizing the centrality of soft power dynamics and their diffusion in local peacebuilding.