The intimacy of enemies: Peacebuilding and The Politics of Small Things

However, I had one last meeting, with Jeffrey Goldfarb, at the New School for Social Research. Goldfarb asked me about myself, my work, and my academic interests. I was struck by his authentic curiosity and his capacity to listen and engage deeply. I explained that I had spent two decades working on and in intractable, violent conflicts. He prompted me, saying: ‘Tell me about what you’ve observed that surprised you.’

I began sharing instances in which individuals immersed in conflict sometimes intentionally interacted with their ‘enemy’ even though the likelihood of harmful consequences was high and the prospects for success were grim. Resourced primarily by passion and hope, these groups and their interactions always struck me as impossibly small. Goldfarb lit up when he heard this: ‘Now we’re talking about something interesting,’ he said.

I disagreed, explaining that small-scale interactions are not important action when it comes to ending war. The United Nations, states, and other international institutions invest billions in pursuing peace – and most of this fails. Small efforts and interactions, I insisted, are marginal. In response, Goldfarb shared an elegant synthesis of his own work, illuminating for me how ‘the politics of small things’ could have radical social and political consequences. As I listened, I understood for the first time that this was what I had been seeing in my own work in places and times when small interactions and efforts appeared powerful. He said, ‘tell me about a time when you saw this’.

In this article, I share the story I told him, one which I have since told several other times.¹ Here, I analyse the story using Goldfarb’s ‘politics of small things’ to illuminate the political power of interaction. I then reflect on why international actors often fail to fully understand and act upon this power, even while ‘localised’ peacebuilding has gained some traction, at least rhetorically, in the international community. I conclude with some thoughts on how small-scale peace efforts can help us rethink the nature of political power. Throughout this article, I draw on my research studying local peacebuilding actors in Palestine and Israel, the Balkans, Liberia, Iraq, Myanmar, Northern Ireland, Timor-Leste, and Lebanon.²

In 2005, I co-led a training and dialogue project with a group of about thirty Iraqis involved in peacebuilding efforts.³ While the participants shared some overall objectives and views, the divisions within the group were also significant. The group reflected Iraq’s demographic and political diversity, involving Kurds, Shia, Sunni, Christians, Turkmen, and Yazidi. This brought both richness and challenges.

The facilitating methodology we used allows participants a great deal of freedom (Owen, 2008). In small groups, people interacted, discussed, argued, and planned. They moved freely from group to group, often exiting the formal process altogether. People drank tea, smoked in the garden, and ate together. Much of the interaction appeared chaotic, even unrelated to the task at hand.

In the closing session, each participant reflected on the experience, passing a branch from an olive tree around the circle as they spoke. When the olive branch reached a young woman from the minority Turkmen community, the third largest ethnic group in Iraq, she began speaking about her experiences, not in Arabic or Kurdish, the two official languages, but in Turkmen, a ‘minority language’ (Taher Al-Hamoud, 2021, p. 7).

Suddenly, an older Sunni Arab man interrupted, angrily scolding the woman for not speaking in Arabic. This man came from Baqubah, a city that had suffered intense violence.

He shouted directly at the woman: ‘Iraqis speak Arabic! Why are you here if you are not a real Iraqi? Speak in Arabic!’ The woman stared straight ahead silently. We reminded the man that we had agreed to allow people to speak in any language in the closing circle. He scowled, and the woman quietly finished her comments, passing the branch to the next person.

When the olive branch reached the man, he began saying the foundational Muslim blessing, often invoked at important moments: ‘Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim – In the name of God, most Gracious, Most Compassionate … ’. After a few words, he faltered and stopped. Others prompted him with the next words of the blessing, but he held up his hand for silence. Then he started to weep, unable to complete his thoughts. He passed the olive branch to the next participant. The group was shaken but continued until everyone had spoken (in various languages).

Following this sharing, we concluded with an evaluation by participants of the workshop. During the evaluation, one participant complained that we had not really ‘taught’ the group about democracy, which had been one of the group’s objectives. At this, the angry/weeping man interrupted again. Now, he disagreed vehemently with the criticism of our time together, insisting that the group had in fact ‘practiced true democracy … because we were allowed to speak in our mother tongues and say what we needed to each other.’ Others agreed, and the atmosphere shifted from critical discontent to joyous celebration, from tension and polarisation to harmony and optimism.⁴

In this intense interaction, we see a vivid expression of Goldfarb’s politics of small things. In his analysis of Polish underground theatre, Goldfarb notes that ‘people met and acted together, defining and defending freedom by constituting definitions of social situations in which … frames were related in ways that ran counter to the existing order’ (2006, p. 33).

In Iraq, the group met and spoke as equals (Goldfarb, 2006). They shared facts and truths that were grounded in their own pluralistic local realities. These facts were in tension with the ideologies of the previous regime, of the state, and of the other hegemons who policed identities and reinforced polarisation. These truths were also at odds with the violent regime change brought by the American invasion and occupation.

In his ‘politics of small things’ framework, which draws from and integrates the work of Swaine Thomas, Goffman, Arendt and Foucault, Goldfarb shows that ‘networks of people constituting transformed social definitions of the situation, politically create a democratic alternative to totalitarianism’ (2006, p. 43). This creation of a unique form of political power, a democratic alternative to total conflict, is precisely what I saw in Iraq.

I refer to this distinctive form of political power as ‘the intimacy of enemies’ (Metz, 2019). Its uniqueness lies in the fact that only these small, localised groups possess the capability to generate and wield this type of power. It is also singular in its open opposition to the prevailing conflict narrative, which is enforced by hegemons (Coleman, 2011; Coy & Woehrle, 2000). Therefore, these groups offer a potent alternative for addressing intractable conflict. Understanding the power of the intimacy of enemies is fundamental for inverting the century-long reliance on actors and methodologies that lack access to, and appreciation for, the political potency generated by these groups.

Next, I will detail the six attributes of the intimacy of enemies, highlighting the manifestation of these attributes in the narrative and illuminating how Goldfarb’s analysis helps us understand them.

To generate the intimacy of enemies, these groups go through an organic process involving six actions and attributes. First, they engage in border crossing, which is transgressive and risky, as it contradicts the social, ideological, and political rules of the conflict. Second, they undertake dialogic interaction and symbiotic action. Third, groups redefine the situation by dissenting from the hegemons that insist on polarisation and opposition. Fourth, they assert their own freedom and agency. Fifth, groups generate emotional energy. These lead to the sixth and final attribute: creating alternatives to the prevailing order. These six actions and attributes generate a dynamic political charge or valence that carries over into future interactions with vast potential that extends well beyond the boundaries of the group and its activities.

In the story I narrated above, we can trace each of the six attributes. By intentionally coming together as equals in Kirkuk, Iraq – by meeting each other across heavily policed conflict lines – the group engaged in geographical, identity and ideological border crossing, transgression and risk-taking. Throughout their time together, the group engaged in intense dialogic interaction, focused on meaningful exchanges of perspectives regarding Iraq’s past, present, and envisioned future. These perspectives included practical plans for their shared vision. The group also redefined the situation, in three distinct ways. They established their own norms and forms of equitable interaction, as the Turkmen woman did by speaking in her mother tongue. Furthermore, they wrestled with these new ways of engaging with one another, as the angry man did in his initial heated interruption and subsequent affirmation. And they enacted this new definition of the situation throughout their time together, and in the concrete plans that emerged from the engagement.

Critically, the group exercised freedom and agency within a totalitarian conflict landscape; they persisted in choosing to convene even after we received threats from armed groups that disapproved of the pluralism and constructive efforts. They kept engaging even when friends and family suggested that doing so was unwise. And, it was evident throughout the time together that they experienced, and were galvanised by, the shared emotional energy generated in that space (anger, sorrow, fear joy, mirth).

Ultimately, the group created alternatives, which for Goldfarb, is the essence of the politics of small things. These interactions become consequential as concrete alternatives emerge. The interrupting man’s final comments are a vivid indicator of the creation of alternatives. In his view, echoed by others, the group not only discussed democracy, but they also actively ‘exercised’ it. Through interaction, the group constituted what Goldfarb describes as ‘small zones of independence and dignity’ (2006, p. 68). These small zones are politically consequential alternatives to the prevailing order – they are new forms of democracy.

Given the facilitative role played by ‘outsiders’ (myself and my colleagues), it may seem this entire story took place in a constructed, contrived, and artificial environment, but this was not the case. In fact, the group constantly defined, shaped and cocreated the form, process, and outcomes, including disregarding guidance offered by us as outsiders. Authentic interactions unfolded and the results were real.

Violent conflict repeatedly shatters our collective spirit. These conflicts are large-scale, severe, protracted, and malignant (Azar, 1990; Bar-Tal, 2013; Coleman, 2011; Deutsch, 1985). They resist resolution, and often relapse into violence after formal peace processes have been completed (Autesserre, 2014; Westendorf, 2015). Research findings on the failure of traditional peace processes are grim (Autesserre, 2014). Forty percent of countries return to violence immediately after a formal negotiated peace, and fifty per cent relapse into civil war within five years (Westendorf, 2015, pp. 7–8). Given these challenges, many scholars, policy makers, and practitioners, myself included, have long called for a renewed engagement with ‘local’ actors (Autesserre, 2014; Campbell et al., 2011; Schirch, 2013; Zelizer, 2013). Our goal is to leverage local knowledge and local methods in peacebuilding efforts. However, a substantial gap still exists between the rhetoric within the international community and the actual realities on the ground.

There is a consensus in the international community that the goal for societies brutalised by large-scale violent conflict involves massive structural and political, developmental, and normative transformations. The ever-expanding mandate for peace is rooted in the foundational concept of ‘positive peace’, which is meant to go far beyond a ‘negative peace’ which simply ends direct violence (Galtung, 1996, p. 32). The positive peace paradigm has expanded to include human rights, environmental justice, sustainable development, and gender equity (Chigas & Woodrow, 2018). Further, it now considers health, the rule of law, the availability of humanitarian assistance (Zelizer, 2013), and ‘human security’ (Schirch, 2013). This expansion of the peace paradigm has brought powerful, positive, and meaningful nuance to peacebuilding.

However, this sprawl has also led to fundamental problems. It reinforces the notion that grand efforts should be spearheaded by traditionally powerful interveners, particularly states and international organisations, and not by small, local actors. Further, international actors tend to pursue peace through rarified and ‘technocratic’ approaches that are primarily concerned with reforming or ‘building’ states and ‘institutions’. This approach often fails to recognise that wars (and peace efforts) are ‘at heart, political processes’ (Westendorf, 2015, p. 4). Given institutional mandates, relationships, and allegiances, international actors often execute peace processes that serve the interests of entrenched elites who profit from the political and social economy of polarisation and war (Autesserre, 2014; Schirch, 2013; Westendorf, 2015). This all adds up to the Politics of Big Things.

Fundamentally, the dilemma of the Politics of Big Things comes down to what is being noticed, privileged and, therefore, supported. As the lens widens to increasingly grander and more utopian visions of peace, and as local actors are marginalised, the dynamics of conflict in society appear even more monolithic and without viable solutions. The fragile cracks and small spaces in which people and institutions take enormous risks to cross conflict lines are overlooked or disregarded. Consequently, they disappear from view, like hairline fissures in a massive stone obelisk. The Politics of Big Things has ironically lead research and practice away from the very sites that offer some of the most innovative and powerful opportunities to transform conflict.

Since the mid-1990s, there have been repeated pronouncements made by international organisations seeking to re-commit to new versions of ‘localised’ and ‘inclusive’ peacemaking approaches (de Coning, 2018). However, while the current developments on these issues are promising, the shift may again be rhetorical. This is because the Politics of Big Things does not fully understand the intimacy of enemies – the political power generated by small local groups in conflict-riven societies. Therefore, in practice, the work of small groups is sidelined, while billions of dollars pour into marginally successful Big Things. This is a waste of both resources and social capital. More critically, it discards the political power of these groups, groups that are sorely needed to address intractable conflict.

The obvious lack of one form of power – macro-institutional power – does not mean that small, local peacebuilding actors are not also powerful. Goldfarb articulates the political power of everyday social interaction (2006). He shows that, in everyday interactions, there are possibilities for subversion, transgression, and the generation of alternatives. Goldfarb notes that the politics of small things emerges when people convene and interact, nurturing the capacity to collaborate. Through these interactions, they cultivate political power. This power stems from the ability of the group to redefine the situation, thereby shaping alternatives to the current status quo (2009, p. 145).

Traditional approaches to peace are challenged to positively impact intractable conflict, and societies continue to suffer. This alternative form of power offers a vibrant, under-explored realm of possibilities in which ‘people make history in their social interactions’ and ‘democracy is in the details’ (Goldfarb, 2006, p. 1). This then raises the question: what is political power?

In a study I conducted, involving interviews with over 60 peacebuilders, I asked participants if they considered their efforts to be political. Some responded: ‘No, we don’t get involved in politics,’ explaining that their work is distinct from party politics, elections, and other formal institutions. For instance, an Israeli peacebuilder drew a clear distinction between the political work she does with other groups and the work she does with the national peacebuilding organisation Combatants for Peace, ‘I have other things that I am active in that are super political and very macro level, meeting with foreign ministers, ambassadors. Trying to get states to recognize the Palestinian state … This is a different hat.’

However, many others said that their work in these groups is indeed political. Some emphasised that all social and economic dynamics are politically relevant, as they are always touched by conflict. For example, a Palestinian peacebuilder from Combatants for Peace said that ‘even the air you smell in Palestine is political. Everything, the food, the water, the money’ (Metz, 2019).

A third group characterised their efforts as both personal and political. An Israeli Combatants for Peace leader, reflecting on the joint bi-national Israeli and Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony, described it as ‘a place where the personal healing really happens. It has a political significance, the fact that the healing depends on the Other, [and it’s] happening on a personal level’ (Metz, 2019).

Certain forms of political power make up and are utilised by states, governments, and parties. However, following Goldfarb, Arendt, and Foucault, I conceptualise political power as it derives from and permeates the fabric of society (Goldfarb, 2012, p. 30); a form of power distinct from institutions and hegemonies, and yet with the capacity to influence those things. The poet Adrienne Rich provides a definition that underscores the embodied, interactive, and liberatory possibilities of politics. She writes:

Does the micro scale of the intimacy of enemies have relevance for macro transformations? Philosopher and economist Kenneth Boulding asserted that ‘whatever exists is possible’. I find that these groups offer possibilities because they simply exist, in defiance of powerful actors and narratives (1978, p. 93).

For example, despite unrelenting aggression from the state and far-right activists, and despite accusations of being ‘normalizers’ of Israeli occupation, the joint Palestinian-Israeli Memorial Day, in which Israelis and Palestinians together mourn their war dead has grown exponentially in scale and impact every year since its inception in 2006. In 2023, the organisers noted that ‘300,000 people participated in the live broadcast event and over one million people streamed it’ (Combatants for Peace, 2023). This intimacy of enemies is expanding.

There is currently a massive proliferation of groups and efforts around the globe in conflict-impacted societies, grounded in civil society. One example is the movement ‘Women Wage Peace’. The organisation claims nearly 50,000 members ‘from the right, center and left of the political spectrum, Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, united in the demand for a mutually binding non-violent accord between Israelis and Palestinian.’ The group formed in the aftermath of the 2014 Israel–Gaza war. They stage massive, public events to call for ‘a negotiated agreement ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with full participation of women in all aspects of peace making and ensuring security.’

Another example is ‘Two States, One Homeland’, a political movement that proposes two states on the entire geographic unit of Palestine / Land of Israel, with commitments to democracy, human rights, migration, restitution, shared Jerusalem and other practical (and radical) approaches to the problems of the region. I read it as creating one grand intimate borderland. The practical implications of this concept pose significant questions. Yet, I am intrigued by its potential to deepen the connection between adversaries.

The current literature regarding civil resistance shows how this kind of mobilisation has significant power to create structural, cultural, and socio-political changes, even in the face of totalitarian and violent hegemony. Chenoweth and Stephan show that nonviolent resistance is nearly twice as likely to achieve some level of success versus violent attempts to overthrow or significantly change a hegemonic power (2011, p. 7). They demonstrate that nonviolent campaigns ‘have a participation advantage over violent insurgencies’ (p. 10) with lower barriers to entry and participation, access to more flexible tactics, and more resilience to challenges and losses. In other words, more people, more intimacy, more power, more change.

I conclude with a confession. There have been many moments when I’ve pondered whether the notion of the ‘intimacy of enemies’ truly holds value, given the stark reality of enduring vicious conflicts.

In fact, I started writing this article on the third day of a massive new war between Hamas and Israel. Gaza has often been referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison (Høvring, 2018). In the context of the Israeli blockade, which has strictly and broadly restricted the flow of all goods, fuel, and people through a near-total control of land, sea and air entry since 2007 (Gisha, 2023), decades of Israeli attacks on one of the most dense urban populations on earth (Al Jazeera, 2022), and occupation of the West Bank and attacks on Palestinian civilians (Human Rights Watch, 2023b), Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023. Twelve hundred Israelis were killed, thousands were injured, and dozens were captured by Hamas (Hassan, 2023; OCHA, 2024b).⁶

In the months that have followed, Gaza has been eviscerated. Violence, collective punishment, and forced displacement have reached unprecedented (Human Rights Watch, 2023a) and genocidal levels (ICJ, 2024). More than thirty thousand Palestinians have been killed, roughly 79,260 have been injured, and at least 1.7 million have been displaced by Israeli military attacks (OCHA, 2024b). The UN describes the situation as ‘a catastrophe, a nightmare … hell on earth’ (OCHA, 2024a). Palestinians in the West Bank and within Isarel are also suffering constant, spectacular violence at the hands of both the Israeli military and emboldened settlers. Families of Israeli hostages continue to beg for the release of their loved ones, alive or dead (B’Tselem, 2023).

Does the ‘intimacy of enemies’ still matter in these darkest and most deadly times? I turn to the answers offered by those that matter in war and peace – local peacebuilding actors. Combatants for Peace shared in an email to its network on 9th October 2023, that, ‘We still believe in another way, even now, especially now.’⁷ In April 2024, a coalition of peacebuilding activists convened the 19th Joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony, a radical re-imagining of mourning with the enemy. In May 2024, the group convened the Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony, in which Israelis and Palestinians confronted the question, ‘how do we liberate ourselves from occupation, oppression and violence?’⁸ These groups emphatically remind us of the unique power of the intimacy of enemies to forge alternatives especially when things are at their worst.

In re-visiting Goldfarb’s text for a presentation celebrating his work, I noticed something that I missed the first time I read it. In a section about a beleaguered political campaign, Goldfarb writes the line that returns me to hope: ‘it is the form of the constitution of their power that is central, not their achievement of their particular ends’ (2006, p. 131). Goldfarb’s insights illuminate the possibilities for peacebuilding in dark times.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).