Cooperatives as a local turn for peace: the impact of relations between south-eastern European cooperatives and the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) on international conflicts.

Supervisor/s: Bernardo Teles Fazendeiro

Doctoral Programme: Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Funding: FCT

The general objective of this project is to verify how the relationships between global agents and local agents are reflected in international conflict prevention and mitigation initiatives, in order to understanding the interaction of both agents in the perspective of the "local turn" in situations of peacebuilding. To this end, the proposal is to analyse how relations between cooperatives in south-eastern Europe - specifically Bosnia and Herzegovina - and the International Alliance of Cooperatives (ICA) are reflected in conflict prevention and mitigation initiatives in the region. With this, it will be possible to verify if the ICA provides peace through its actions, corroborating the positivist concept of peace in a liberal top-down matrix model or the opposite, if it is the cooperatives as local agents that have contributed for the advancement of peacebuilding, following a bottom-up model, according to the most recent post-positivist discussions.