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In all conflicts it is possible to find individuals and groups of people who help each other, who try to bring communities together or who resist the dynamics of conflict. This can be described as civicness. In all our sites, we observed an emphasis among a range of actors on the importance of civicness, albeit in different vernacular versions – citoyenneté in DRC, for example, or madani in Syria and Iraq.

In the Conflict Research Programme, we used the term civicness as a logic of public authority, which we contrasted to the political marketplace and to identity politics. And we applied the term at all levels – local, national and international. It has something to with the notion that public authority is based on consent, and consent is generated voluntarily through shared deliberative processes based upon norms and rules that value respect for persons. This includes practices that sustain integrity, trust, civility, inclusion and dialogue, and non-violence.

It is a logic that is based on the implicit assumption of a social contract among citizens. Acting like a citizen means acting as though social relations are based this social contract. Civicness has to be understood both as a normative aspiration and as something that is empirically observable. 

Our civicness research outputs: