Everyday Peace: After Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar’s Rohingya Conflict’

In our earlier chapter, we provided an overview of the theory of everyday peace, and explored its relevance at a theoretical level to community development in conflict-affected contexts. In this chapter, the authors explore build on this theory to discuss our attempts to operationalise it into community development practice in Rakhine State, Myanmar – a region that has seen significant intercommunal and armed conflict in recent years resulting in two-thirds of the Rohingya population being driven into Bangladesh in an act of ethnic cleansing. This chapter explores ways in which the principles and typologies of ‘everyday peace’ are being translated into community development practice by the first two authors and evaluated by the third, in a programme working to strengthen peace formation between villages of Rohingya Muslim remaining in Myanmar and their Rakhine Buddhist neighbours.