Agir pour la Paix: how a group or marginalized youth became actors for peace after the slaughter of their friends
Résumé
This presentation focuses on Western cities that are considered “at peace” but which regularly declare war, including on their own citizens (on drugs, on terrorism, etc.). it presents the case of Villeneuve (Grenoble, France), a marginalized social housing neighborhood with problems that have become typical for the “banlieue crisis”. It has had to deal with urban violence, the consequences of terrorist attacks, rising levels of islamophobia, increasing criminalization of the neighborhood’s male racialized youth and, finally, incidents of black-on-black violence, or rather violence among youth defending their reputation and spatial identities. This latter violence gets little political attention but is a major source of concern for inhabitants. This presentation looks into the imbrications of direct, structural and epistemic violence as well as the peace-building agency of this youth. It adopts a geographies of peace approach that views peace as an everyday process of building ever-expanding networks that share life-affirming values rather than life-destructing ones. It uses Dugan’s nested paradigms approach, and explores how a group of neighborhood youth, directly affected by violence, became actors of peace in the Agir pour la Paix collective. This grass-roots initiative was created independently from more institutional approaches to peace and violence prevention and this is one of its success factors.