Agus Wandi and Nezar Patria discuss Asian perestroika in Indonesia. Years of reformist mobilisation underpinned the collapse of President Suharto’s New Order dictatorship in 1998 – ultimately sparked by the Asian economic crisis. Transition since then has required difficult processes to disentangle the military from the political sphere and to decentralise power.

Joanna Wheeler explores relationships between citizenship, violence and authority in Rio’s favelas in Brazil. Drug trafficking groups and para-state militias have become dominant actors in the city’s informal settlements. Militias provide apparently contradictory functions: they protect communities from violent state intrusion into the favelas in the form of predatory and corrupt police; but they also dominate communities politically and socially through the use violence and other forms of coercion. Ultimately, citizenship is “drained of meaning” by all sources of violence.

Karim Merchant and Ghulam Rasoul Rasouli analyse attempts in Afghanistan to use Community Development Councils (CDCs) to roll out a national reintegration programme for ex-combatants at the local level. The CDCs’ main function is to implement the National Solidarity Program (NSP), established in 2003 as “the largest people’s project in the history of Afghanistan”. There have been challenges related to the level of CDCs’ accountability to local communities.

Doreen Khoury describes how analyses of the conflict in Syria routinely ignore the achievements of grassroots opposition and the resilience of the Syrian people. Syrian society is the ultimate target of deadly sectarian violence between shabbiha (regime enforcers) and jihadist groups. But behind this devastation lie concrete popular efforts at inclusive local organisation and self-rule, and countless local peacebuilding initiatives aimed at bridging political, ideological and sectarian divides.

Ken Menkhaus asks how viable it is to mobilise the legitimacy of local leadership for peace. Legitimate representation is difficult to identify in talks to end violent conflict that can include a proliferation of armed groups, severe social and political fragmentation, or communal or criminal violence. Local governance and leadership is not a panacea – and can encompass warlords, vigilante justice or thinly veiled political platforms.

Virisila Buadromo describes the constitutional process in Fiji in 2012, and in particular the experiences of the women’s movement and civil society in engaging with it. The women’s movement had initially feared that involvement in a weak constitutional process risked legitimising a flawed outcome. In the end, the process was derailed after the government rejected the constitutional commission’s draft in January 2013, and subsequently enacted its own constitution in September by military decree.

Cheryl Saunders explains how a constitution can help safeguard foundations for peace by developing a new or revised framework for state-society relations. The “performance legitimacy” of a new constitution (how it works in practice) is a major test, assessed over time through the effectiveness of the state and its level of popular approval. Constitutional reviews and peace processes share core principles of best practice, including wide public participation and fair representation of views and interests, but they are not always easily compatible.