Winner of the 2020 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize

The Conflict Research Society congratulates Pamina Firchow on winning the 2020 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize for her book titled Reclaiming Everyday peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War published by Cambridge University Press (2018).

Reclaiming Everyday Peace addresses the effectiveness and impact of local level interventions on communities affected by war. Using an innovative methodology to generate participatory numbers, Pamina Firchow finds that communities saturated with external interventions after war do not have substantive higher levels of peacefulness according to community-defined indicators of peace than those with lower levels of interventions. These findings suggest that current international peacebuilding efforts are not very effective at achieving peace by local standards because disproportionate attention is paid to reconstruction, governance and development assistance with little attention paid to community ties and healing. Firchow argues that a more bottom up approach to measuring the effectiveness of peacebuilding is required. By finding ways to effectively communicate local community needs and priorities to the international community, efforts to create an atmosphere for an enduring peace are possible.

The prize committee received over 50 nominations from conflict/peace researchers, institutions, practitioners and publishers from around the world. The committee chose the winning title out of 6 short-listed books based on criteria such as how well the book demonstrates a significant contribution to conflict/peace studies, impact factor, methodological rigour, robustness and credibility of the findings, the extent to which it is interdisciplinary, quality of writing and presentation. 

Judges on the Prize Committee praised Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War for its “elegant and simple solution” to the complex problems associated with evaluating everyday peace. The judges highlighted that “this book offers a deep, nuanced treatment of peace as concept, and as lived experience”.  It offered a very “creative and systematic approach” with extensive fieldwork and “methodological innovation”, incorporating consideration of “players in different levels of peacebuilding efforts”. The judges also praised this book for its “radical” policy relevance: “If we accept what Firchow is saying, then the implication is that the existing ‘liberal’ peacebuilding paradigm needs to be flipped inside-out.

This title was elected out of a total of six finalists. These were excellent contenders for the prize and the judges also praised the excellent quality of research in all of the shortlisted books.  Our congratulations are extended to the following running up shortlisted titles (in no particular order):

Campbell, Susana 2019. Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding. Cambridge University Press.

Abdi, D.I. and Mason, S.J., 2019. Mediation and Governance in Fragile Contexts: Small Steps to Peace. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Caplan, R., 2019. Measuring Peace: Principles, Practices, and Politics. Oxford University Press

Mironova, V., 2019. From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human Resources of Non-State Armed Groups. Oxford University Press. 

Weidmann, N.B. and Rød, E.G., 2019. The Internet and political protest in autocracies. Oxford University Press. 

Thank you also to the CRS Book Prize Judges – Christine Cheng, Isabel Phillips, Govinda Clayton, Robert Nagel, Catalina Montoya, and Andrew Thomson (facilitator).

Due to Covid-19, this year’s CRS conference has been postponed until 26th and 27th of August, 2021.