Bøger i Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies serien

Through an exploration of the statist ideological underpinnings of peace-building, it traces how the concept was transformed by institutional actors - international organisations and states - into a tool to further the state-building goals of liberal peace-building.

This book explores how national identity has been negotiated and (re)imagined through the political symbols that embody it in post-conflict Timor-Leste.

The book engages the conceptual links between theatre and peacebuilding and then offers an in-depth empirical exploration of how three South Asian theatre groups approach peacebuilding: Jana Karaliya in Sri Lanka, Jana Sanskriti in India, and Sarwanam in Nepal.

The field of peacemaking is in turbulent change. In the 21st century, private peacemakers have become a central part of peace diplomacy and have appeared as flexible actors whose innovative thinking paves the way for reconsidering and reinventing old practices of mediation.

This volume examines the possibility - or need - of a revitalization of pacifism as a world-political practice. It takes as its point of departure the observation that although 'just war thinking' has long been dominant in Western debates about war and peace, recent events have served to temper enthusiasm about the doctrine.

"Ending violent conflict requires societies to take leaps of political imagination. Artistic communities are often uniquely placed to help promote new thinking by enabling people to see things differently. In place of conflict's binary divisions, artists are often charged with exploring the ambiguities and possibilities of the excluded middle. Yet, their role in peacebuilding remains little explored. This excellent and agenda-setting volume provides a ground-breaking look at a range of artistic practices, and the ways in which they have attempted to support peacebuilding - a must-read for all practitioners and policy-makers, and indeed other peacemakers looking for inspiration."Professor Christine Bell, FBA, Professor of Constitutional Law, Assistant Principal (Global Justice), and co-director of the Global Justice Academy, The University of Edinburgh, UK"Peacebuilding and the Arts offers an impressive and impressively comprehensive engagement with the role that visual art, music, literature, film and theatre play in building peaceful and just societies. Without idealizing the role of the arts, the authors explore their potential and limits in a wide range of cases, from Korea, Cambodia, Colombia and Northern Ireland to Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Israel-Palestine."Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland, Australia, and author of Aesthetics and World Politics and Visual Global Politics"Peacebuilding and the Arts is the first publication to focus critically and comprehensively on the relations between the creative arts and peacebuilding, expanding the conventional boundaries of peacebuilding and conflict transformation to include the artist, actor, poet, novelist, dramatist, musician, dancer and film director. The sections on the visual arts, music, literature, film and theatre, include case studies from very different cultures, contexts and settings but a central theme is that the creative arts can play a unique and crucial role in the building of peaceful and just societies, with the power to transform relationships, heal wounds, and nurture compassion and empathy. Peacebuilding and the Arts is a vital and unique resource which will stimulate critical discussion and further research, but it will also help to refine and reframe our understanding of peacebuilding. While it will undoubtedly become mandatory reading for students of peacebuilding and the arts, its original approach and dynamic exploratory style should attract a much wider interdisciplinary audience."Professor Anna King, Professor of Religious Studies and Social Anthropology and Director of Research, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace (WCRRP), University of Winchester, UKThis volume explores the relationship between peacebuilding and the arts. Through a series of original essays, authors consider some of the ways that different art forms (including film, theatre, music, literature, dance, and other forms of visual art) can contribute to the processes and practices of building peace. This book breaks new ground, by setting out fresh ways of analysing the relationship between peacebuilding and the arts. Divided into five sections on the Visual Arts, Music, Literature, Film and Theatre/Dance, over 20 authors offer conceptual overviews of each art form as well as new case studies from around the globe and critical reflections on how the arts can contribute to peacebuilding. As interest in the topic increases, no other book approaches this complex relationship in the way that Peacebuilding and the Arts does. By bringing together the insights of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of the arts and peacebuilding, this book develops a series of unique, critical perspectives on the interaction of diverse art forms with a range of peacebuilding endeavours.

The second part focuses on the most revolutionary change since the beginning of the nuclear revolution, namely the Humanitarian Initiative and the resulting Nuclear Ban Treaty (2017), which allows imagining non-nuclear peace anew.

This book assesses the claim that peacebuilding is a moribund international practice. The story of peacebuilding parallels the broader story of liberalism's rise and fall in world politics, including the attempt to remedy an ailing patient by administering a magic medicine - "the local turn".

Rather, peace professionals work on a distinct set of peaces, that differ along four dimensions. In five case study chapters, the operational visions of peace held by Dutch military officers, diplomats and civil society peace workers, as well as civil society peace workers from Lebanon and the Philippines are explored and compared to each other.

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.

This edited volume examines how the multiple manifestations of social violence in Brazil impacts the building of a peaceful society. The book shows the agency of civil society in a violent society, in which NGOs and communities engage in key peace formation action, including advocacy for human rights and promoting arts.

Using the Cyprus conflict as a case study, this book examines how the securitization process in protracted conflict environments changes, as it becomes routinized and potentially even institutionalized.

This book explores the prospects and limits of international intervention in building peace and creating a new state in an ethnically divided society and fragmented international order.

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.

With inevitable major economic and political transformations ahead, NGOs need to acknowledge and manage their policy dilemmas so that they can anticipate the many inevitable problems that consistently arise in attempting to avoid the return of war by building peace over the medium to long-term

This book assesses the claim that peacebuilding is a moribund international practice. The story of peacebuilding parallels the broader story of liberalism's rise and fall in world politics, including the attempt to remedy an ailing patient by administering a magic medicine - "the local turn".

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 third and 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 edited volume examines how the multiple manifestations of social violence in Brazil impacts the building of a peaceful society. The chapters reflect on the role of state, organized crime and civil society. They provide a unique analysis of how the Brazilian state deals with criminal violence, but also finds challenges to comply with Sustainable Development Goal 16, to interdict police violence, and to provide an efficient gun policy. The book shows the agency of civil society in a violent society, in which NGOs and communities engage in key peace formation action, including advocacy for human rights and promoting arts. The overall aim of this book is to advance the research agenda regarding the intersections between peace, public security, and violence, under the lens of peace studies. In Brazil, the challenges to peace differ markedly from areas in regular conflict.

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 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.

This book investigates why peace and reform processes across the world have recently been stagnating or have become blocked. They have failed to maintain security, rights, development, and justice in the liberal international order. The book identifies the related rise of counter-peace processes at the heart of failed peacemaking efforts, and explores the implications for an emerging multi-polar order where local and international tools for peace and reform appear to be ineffective. Across a range of recent cases, from Cambodia, the Balkans, the Sahel region, DRC, Colombia, Afghanistan, and many others, such dynamics are becoming clearer. In particular, small-scale blocking tactics across different peace processes have been evolving into larger political strategies which are then disseminated within revisionist and revanchist international networks. Ultimately, this phenomenon has undermined liberal international order.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 book argues that we can capitalize on the tolerance of ambiguity-enhancing potentialities inherent in visual images ¿ their non-coherence ¿ and thus increase our capability of tolerating ambiguities. Studying international relations equals studying ambiguity. The international system is complex, and where there is complexity, there is also ambiguity. Crucially, in a world saturated not only with ambiguities but also with visual images, it is mandatory to think ambiguity and visuality together. The authors analyze the constructive and peaceful potentialities of ambiguities through an exploration of journalistic imagery in the context of post-war Bosnia and post-siege Sarajevo.The book is a theoretically sophisticated, yet accessible, and politically relevant exercise in inter-disciplinary thinking, uniquely combining literature on complexity, ambiguity and visuality thus offering important readings for international relations, peace and conflict research, and security studies.

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.