Abstract
Many countries are facing repeated cycles of violence (World Bank, 2011; Walter, 2010), with more than 68 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. In a quest for sustainable peace, a growing interest can be observed regarding how civil society and business can bring about peace. Cooperatives blend association and enterprise with significant potential for peace (MacPherson and Paz 2015; Joy and MacPherson 2007). As bottom-up initiatives, they provide solutions focused at the local level offering learning and practicing nonviolent interaction (Wanyama 2014; Sentama 2009; Havers 2007) and providing decent jobs and livelihoods (Date-Bah ed. 2003). The key word being supply, they are mainly seen as post-conflict community-based organizations (CBOs) that provide for basic human needs, gather labour, demobilize soldiers, and restart agriculture and services. Field observations, however, lend to a broader idea of how cooperatives contribute to positive peacebuilding by increasing trust and agency, raising empowerment, equality and empathy, while managing resources through a renewed notion of the commons (Ostrom 1990), even though challenges come as development takes place. Food security linked to SDG 2 can and need to be enhanced on this basis. The sample of visited cooperatives calls for further research.
Keywords: Cooperatives, Peacebuilding, Rwanda, sustainable development, sustainable livelihoods