UCLA

In a global era when most wars are fought between state and non-state actors, how do people make and maintain peace? In the Philippines, indigenous peoples of Sagada declared their community as a ‘peace zone’ in 1989 and banned the entry of the military and New People’s Army (NPA), a non-state armed group waging the world’s longest communist insurgency. Existing research on peace zones identifies Sagada as a ‘best practice’ model for other countries. For almost 30 years, the indigenous community of Sagada has effectively refused military and NPA presence and prevented conflict-related civilian deaths and displacement. This dissertation examines the processes through which the community maintains the peace zone beyond the purview of the state and rebels, and what these tell us about peace. Situated within the ‘local’ and ‘ethnographic turn’ in peacebuilding literature, this dissertation also considers the challenges of ethnographic approaches in the study of peace, specifically from the perspective of a local researcher from the Global South. Focusing upon ‘suspicion’ and ‘double suspicion’, it offers a reflective account of the many challenges local researchers encounter in the field, revealing the differential politics in ethnography. Finally, this dissertation locates peace as an intellectual object of study in Geography, asserting that while geographers broaden the understanding of peace beyond its dominant definition of the absence of violence, there is a tendency to define peace within default Western framework that limits, rather than broaden, scholarly efforts in challenging normative Liberal Peace practices. At stake in this dissertation is a re-thinking of peace ‘from the margins’, contributing to the emergent field of Peace Geographies.