Resilience and the ‘everyday’: beyond the paradox of ‘liberal peace’

Over the last decade there has been a shift towards critical understandings of ‘liberal peace’ approaches to international intervention, which argue that local culture holds the key to the effectiveness of peace interventions. In this ‘bottom-up’ approach, peace, reconciliation, and a ‘culture of law’ then become secondary effects of sociocultural norms and values. However, these liberal peace critiques have remained trapped in the paradox of liberal peace: the inability to go beyond the binaries of liberal universalism and cultural relativism. This understanding will be contrasted with the rise of ‘resilience’ approaches to intervention – which build on this attention to the particular context of application but move beyond this paradox through philosophical pragmatism and the focus on concrete social practices. This article clarifies the nature of this shift through the focus on the shifting understanding of international intervention to address the failings of the ‘war on drugs’ in the Americas.

Culture and the 2012 games: creating a tourism legacy?

The role of tourism in delivering wider economic legacies is strongly stated in recent national tourism policy documents. The Olympic Games are envisaged to have the legacy impact of ‘4 million extra visitors’ and ‘50,000 extra jobs’ over 4 years (DCMS (2011). Government Tourism Policy, p. 15). This paper considers the nature of Olympic tourism and the possible contribution of the Cultural Olympiad to developing a cultural tourism legacy. It does this by investigating local perceptions of culture and local cultural enactments in the London Borough of Hackney, one of the five boroughs surrounding the Olympic Park. This research shows that local cultural enactments and programming connected to the Olympics are largely motivated by a wider social agenda. They are funded by a wide variety of arts, social and youth programmes and largely reflect initiatives and projects that were already in place in the Borough. While there is an acceptance that cultural events might stimulate the visitor economy, specific discourses around ‘tourism’ and ‘tourists’ are not expressed by the people engaged in the local process.