Adverse incorporation and local economies of peace

This article challenges the peace- and statebuilding reflex towards integrating hitherto excluded people into development and markets. What is missing, it argues, is an understanding of the adverse terms by which local populations and communities are already incorporated into systems that are exploitative. Applying an ‘adverse incorporation’ analytical frame to a community of small farmers in Tunisia, it shows how local tensions and grievances are rooted in the interfacing of renewed marketisation at the national level with longer running trajectories of development and change at the local level whose terms may already be unpopular or contested.