Peace is also barked: how communities assemble everyday security

How do communities sustain everyday security when there is little to recover and even less with which to adapt? Existing resilience scholarship largely assumes that communities possess capacities enabling recovery or adaptation following disruption. We argue that this assumption becomes inadequate under conditions of prolonged scarcity, where conventional security institutions and resources are largely absent. We extend resilience scholarship through the concept of ayóm-ayómic resilience, which begins from scarcity rather than capacity and asks how communities assemble security using whatever resources are locally available. Drawing on field-based observations from rural Mindanao, we use the barking dog as an analytic vignette—not to argue that animals are hidden peacebuilders, but to expose an ontological blind spot in peacebuilding scholarship. The vignette reveals that security emerges through heterogeneous relations among humans, animals, material objects, environments, and shared meanings. The essay broadens peacebuilding by rethinking how security is assembled under conditions of institutional absence.