Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

This book explores the powerful role of ordinary people's agency in times of violent conflict. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a Critical Discourse Analysis, the author draws out the motivations, drivers and strategies at individual and community levels. With a focus on people’s own voices, this research highlights rich findings showing a wide range of experiences and actions that people engaged in during the violent conflict, and dimensions that are often missed in dominant explanations of violent conflict. Therefore, while looking at peace and conflict from an everyday perspective, the question of power and the meaning of peace knowledge become central. This monograph addresses the power of people’s agency not only in shaping the politics and dynamics of violence, but also in redefining what ‘peace’ and ‘change’ ought to look like. Essential reading for researchers and students of Peace and Conflict Studies, and also International Relations, Security Studies, Resistance Studies, Anthropology, Politics, International Development.

This edited book offers a collection of highly nuanced accounts of children and childhoods in peace and conflict across political time and space. Organized according to three broad themes (ontologies, pedagogies, and contingencies), each chapter explores the complexities of a particular case study, providing new insights into the ways children’s lives figure as terrains of engagement, contestation, ambivalence, resistance, and reproduction of militarisms. The first three chapters challenge dominant ontologies that prefigure childhood in particular ways. These include who counts as a child worthy of protection, questions of voice and participation, and the diminution of agency. The chapters in the second section bring to view everyday pedagogies whereby myriad knowledges, performances, practices, and competencies may function to militarize children’s lives, including in but not limited to advanced (post)industrial societies of the global North. The thirdand final section includes investigations that foreground questions of responsibility to children. Here, contributors assess, among other things, resilience-building, the exigencies of protection, and the ethics of military recruitment practices targeting children.

This book is driven by the question: what role is played by the local security research community in Kosovo’s internationally-led Security Sector Reform? Kosovo’s SSR has been heavily driven by international knowledge rather than the context-sensitive evidence, with negative implications for the legitimacy and sustainability of SSR. Centred on an analysis of an extensive interview survey of international SSR practitioners and local researchers in Kosovo and local research papers, this book highlights how local research has engaged with, challenged and contributed to international SSR. Despite the general experience of local marginalisation, local researchers have an important role to play. Following engagement with local research, international SSR practitioners may consider local context in greater depth and think more critically about SSR implications. This highlights the potentially key role that local researchers can play to support effective post-conflict recovery.

This book analyses and furthers the academic debates on post-liberal peacebuilding, through a number of conceptual, theoretical and empirical research outputs. Part I includes a review of how the recent discourse on peacebuilding has evolved, and three conceptual/theoretical perspectives relevant to post-liberal peacebuilding. In particular, the editors propose the concept of bespoke peacebuilding to articulate key features of new peacebuilding models. Part II introduces five case studies that present how alternative peacebuilding models are being shaped (or can be shaped) in practice. Essential reading for scholars and students in Peace and Conflict Studies, International Relations, and International Security Studies.

Chapter 8 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book considers the growing interest in transitional justice practices that take place against the backdrop of ongoing settler-colonialism in Palestine. By critiquing the role of common top-down and bottom-up interventions, namely truth recovery and international criminal justice, the book argues that transitional justice acts as an extension of a deeply flawed peacebuilding process that has been so destructive in Palestine and has a deflating effect when it comes to advancing calls for meaningful decolonisation. A ‘radicalisation’ of transitional justice that takes place in settler-colonial contexts, one that prioritises conversations around meaningful decolonisation, is therefore required. The book will appeal to those with an interest in peacebuilding, conflict transformation and transitional justice. 

Spoilers and tactical blockages to peace have connected across local, national, regional and international scales, highlighting ideological divisions. Drawing on counter-revolutionary theory, the concept of counter-peace is used as a tool to critically interrogate a systemic array of blockages to peace. Distinct counter-peace patterns are now entangled in peace and reform processes, including  the stalemate pattern, the limited counter-peace, and the unmitigated counter-peace patterns. Across cases, once tactical blockages begin to form these patterns, they become systemic and ultimately enable conflict escalation. Consequently, the intimate entanglement of the existing international peace architecture with counter-peace processes points to ideological divisions in international order, as well as the growing gulf between diminished practices of peace and reform with critical scholarship on peace, justice, and sustainability.

This open access book provides a comprehensive analysis of the EU's crucial support for the implementation of the Havana Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP. It explores the use of new approaches and instruments that, despite some limitations and criticisms, could go beyond conventional liberal peace and provide useful lessons. Particular attention is paid to three axes: strengthening civil society, protection of human rights and a territorial peace perspective, as a contribution to the "local turn" in peace policies. The book first outlines the background of the conflict, the EU's two-decade defense of a negotiated peace, and the complexities of the peace process. Then, it analyses the development cooperation and political support provided in different areas: the collective reinsertion of ex-guerrillas, women and gender initiatives, the rights of ethnic communities, the sophisticated transitional justice system, as well as activities on reconciliation,victims and protection of human rights defenders.

This book analyses how humanitarian crises, conflicts, and peace processes in the Horn of Africa (HoA) were covered by two different media outlets, the Daily Nation (DN) and the Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), currently known as The New Humanitarian. The author develops a new framework called, the Four-Part Framework and examines the mediatization of humanitarian crises, conflict and peace process in particular conflicts and peace processes in Kenya, Sudan and South Sudan. Regional conflict and media situations are also discussed in the book as well as important recommendations that could be applicable in similar situations of other locations.

This book makes a novel contribution to the literature by examining the intersection of social media, conflict and peacebuilding. It challenges traditional state-centric and Eurocentric approaches to international relations and peace and conflict studies by examining the role of social media in peacebuilding beyond a simplistic tech-solutionist versus tech-skeptical duality. The book explains why the impact of social media on peacebuilding is complex and depends on the political context and strategies of the actors involved in it. It uses an interdisciplinary lens to explore the potential and limitations of social media in peacebuilding, thereby contributing to a theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of digital technology in shaping conflict and promoting peace.

Chapter “Fighting Hate Speech on Social Media: The Challenge of “Deep Work” in Digital Peacebuilding” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution BY 4.0 International license via link.springer.com.

In its second edition, this extended and revised volume brings together alternative and innovative approaches in conflict resolution. With traditional military intervention repeatedly contributing to instability and violence, the study of alternative approaches has become imperative. Can forgiveness help heal relationships in post-apartheid South Africa? How can art assist dealing with ‘unrememberable’ events such as the genocide in Rwanda? What transformational resources do women offer in contexts of massive human rights violations? The aim of this edited volume is twofold: to provide and encourage critical reflection of the approaches presented here and to explore concrete improvements in conflict resolution strategies. In its interdisciplinary and international outlook, this work combines the tried-and-tested approaches from conflict resolution experts in academia, NGOs and civil society, making it an invaluable tool for academics and practitioners alike.

This open access book explores how to build a gender-just peace in which women’s political citizenship is foregrounded through a case study of Northern Ireland. It addresses the role that civil society can play in peacebuilding and in political life in deeply divided transitional societies. It specifically focuses on women’s groups, and, as such, studies what grassroots peacebuilding across an ethnic divide can look like in practice. Further, it analyses what it means to build a gender equal citizenship based on the lived expertise and experiences of women’s activism, political participation and interethnic cooperation during and after conflict. Based on material collected through interviews, participant observation and official documents, the book explores the potential for gender-just political citizenship but also the risk of backlash in terms of women’s rights during a transition from armed conflict to peace. Essential reading for students and researchers in Political Science, Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Transitional Justice.

Everyday peacebuilding through democratic political education is a necessary but not sufficient condition for limiting negative political emotions such as anger, fear, and resentment, and for cultivating the political virtues needed for an alternative, more democratic orientation towards power: one that values and exercises power with other members of emergent political communities, not power over them. These demotic political virtues include self-restraint, resistance, humility, respect for the civic dignity of others, non-violent protest, and the radical poise needed to cultivate and coordinate this constellation of political virtues. For those who have been forcibly displaced or are only dimly aware of their complicity in this type of political violence, to maintain a radically poised stance is a continuing process of democratic political education. This book demonstrates how this notion of Radical Poise in theory and practice can be developed through a hybrid process of political education in one country, Mali, to contest the growth of violence and fear there and elsewhere.