Mobilização de atores locais na construção da paz: um estudo do caso do Instituto Favela da Paz

Abstract

Despite of the conceptual and theoretical developments that follows the field of Peace Studies, as well as the progressive ones related to international operationalization efforts in the search for peace, primarily within the United Nations, debates on violence are still marginalized on both fronts beyond the immediate and predictable contours of the State, but still with a broad transnational reach, as the emergence of relations in organized crime networks denotes.The search for mitigation of international conflicts has usually centered on collective efforts to restore peace in scenarios of directly expressed violence, particularly through interstate or intrastate wars. Therefore, the focus on state-centered violence through the lens of international relations postpones serious and coordinated attention to the emergence of armed social violence, another recurrent phenomenon of political and social instability, present both in conflict and post-conflict societies, but also in democratic societies categorized as peaceful. Thus, as an alternative to the vertical agenda for promoting peace, and aiming to promote hybrid and unrestricted dialogues, this research aims to contribute to debates that include the various manifestations of violence and the role of unconventional actors, such as the local agency (bottom-up), in their daily practices of resilience and transmutation of everyday violence. As object of analysis, the experience of the Favela da Paz Institute is adopted, a project conceived and coordinated by local residents and which aims to establish, in multiple action fronts, a sustainable community guided by a culture of peace in the Jardim Ângela-SP, a region considered by the UN in the 1990s as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world. As a result, it was observed that the practices led by the Favela da Paz Institute intuitively converge with the Peace Formation approach of Oliver P. Richmond, by emancipating local actors, connected in transversal and transnational networks, in the promotion of peace in their own terms.