Social economics, poverty and violence after peace

Post-conflict transition is a messy and incomplete process with inevitable remnants of violence living on through extant combatant structures, state security apparatus and criminal opportunism. Drawing on the experience of Northern Ireland, this paper argues that these uncertainties have caused (some argue forced) belligerents to rehabilitate their networks and experience to seek out new sources of legitimacy and privilege. Coercion, control and surveillance are all part of the necessary assemblage of ethnic conflict, and in its aftermath, different forms of violence (or simply the threat of violence) reproduce identarian conflict and simultaneously exploit its reproduction. Liberal and increasingly neoliberal forms of peace fail to connect with the people and places most damaged by conflict and the relationship between poverty, sectarianism and place intensify the conditions for enduring forms of paramilitarism and ultimately violence. The paper argues that tackling the distinct economic conditions of the most marginal places is a critical but undervalued dimension of violence after peace. The analysis concludes by evaluating the potential of social economics in transitional processes in which the relationship between violence, place and poverty are constitutive of embedded forms of materialist peacebuilding.