This open access book brings together discourse on children and peace from the 15th International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace, covering issues pertinent to children and peace and approaches to making their world safer, fairer and more sustainable. The book is divided into nine sections that examine traditional themes (social construction and deconstruction of diversity, intergenerational transitions and memories of war, and multiculturalism), as well as contemporary issues such as Europe's "migration crisis", radicalization and violent extremism, and violence in families, schools and communities. Chapters contextualize each issue within specific social ecological frameworks in order to reflect on the multiplicity of influences that affect different outcomes and to discuss how the findings can be applied in different contexts. The volume also provides solutions and hope through its focus on youth empowerment and peacebuilding programs for children and families. This forward-thinking volume offers a multitude of views, approaches, and strategies for research and activism drawn from peace psychology scholars and United Nations researchers and practitioners. This book's multi-layered emphasis on context, structural determinants of peace and conflict, and use of research for action towards social cohesion for children and youth has not been brought together in other peace psychology literature to the same extent. Children and Peace: From Research to Action will be a useful resource for peace psychology academics and students, as well as social and developmental psychology academics and students, peace and development practitioners and activists, policy makers who need to make decisions about the matters covered in the book, child rights advocates and members of multilateral organizations such as the UN.

This book sheds new light on transrational approaches to peace research and highlights elicitive approaches to facilitation. Rather than encouraging researchers, teachers and practitioners to control and suppress their own positionality, the book argues that they can see themselves as a potential (re)source that can be creatively tapped for their work. Using dance as a central metaphor, it seeks to reposition research and facilitation as a truly experiential process where the entirety of human experiences and epistemologies can be brought into interplay, opening up new sources of knowledge. Providing a cutting-edge theoretical framework and based on his practical experience, the author demonstrates that facilitation and research are not just cognitive, but can also be(come) embodied, emotional, intuitive, relational and spiritual. By proposing a systematic, methodological framework for research and facilitation, the book offers practical guidance for peace practitioners, facilitators and researchers interested in working through all dimensions of their being and engaging with conflict transformation in a holistic way.

The book discusses India's evolving deterrent force posturing in South Asia under the conceptual essentials of nuclear revolution when it comes to various combinations of conventional and nuclear forces development and the strategic implications it intentionally or unintentionally poses for the South Asian region. The book talks about how the contemporary restructuring of India's deterrent force posture affects India's nuclear strategy, in general, and how this in turn could affect the policies of its adversaries: China and Pakistan, in particular. Authors discuss the motivations of such posturing that broadly covers India's restructuring of its Nuclear Draft Doctrine (DND), the ballistic missile development program, including that of its Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system, and the possibility of conflicts between China-India and India-Pakistan, given their transforming strategic force postures and their recurring adversarial behavior against each other in the Southern Asian region.

This book explores the meaning of peace according to (some of) the people who make it. Based on some 200 interviews, it empirically studies the visions of peace that professional peaceworkers from the Netherlands, Lebanon and Mindanao (Philippines) are working on. As such, it seeks to add a strong empirical element to the debate on liberal peacebuilding. The main argument of the book is that amongst practitioners, there is no liberal peace consensus at all. 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. Differences are observed along both geographical and professional lines, but also within each group.

Peacekeeping and the Asia-Pacific explores the politics, challenges, and future of UN peacekeeping operations from the Asia-Pacific. The first section looks at contributions from the sub-regions: Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. The second section of the book looks at individual country case studies including: Australia, Solomon Islands, Japan, and Thailand. The third, and concluding, section consists of a theoretical summary on the central conceptual theme of Asian motivations for PKO contributions. This content was originally published in vols. 18:3-4 and 19:3-4 of the Journal of International Peacekeeping.

This edited volume explores the Israeli-Turkish relations in the 2000s from a multi-dimensional perspective providing a comparative analysis on the subjects of politics, ideology, civil society, identity, energy, and economic relations. The contributors from both countries offer insights on the complex situation in the Middle East which is important for the understanding of the contemporary region. The work will appeal to a wide audience including academics, researchers, political analysts, and journalists.

At the heart of dealing with difficult people is handling their--and your own--emotions. How do you stay calm in a tough conversation? How do you stay unruffled in the face of passive-aggressive comments? And how do you know if you're difficult to work with?

This book explains the research behind our emotional response to awful colleagues and shows how to build the empathy and resilience to make those relationships more productive.

Northern Ireland presents a fundamental challenge for the sociology of religion - how do religious beliefs, attitudes and identities relate to practices, violence and conflict? In other words, what does religion do? These interrogations are at the core of this book. It is the first critical and comprehensive review of the ways in which the social sciences have interpreted religion's significance in Northern Ireland. In particular, it examines the shortcomings of existing interpretations and, in turn, suggests alternative lines of thinking for more robust and compelling analyses of the role(s) religion might play in Northern Irish culture and politics. Through, and beyond, the case of Northern Ireland, the second objective of this book is to outline a critical agenda for the social study of religion, which has theoretical and methodological underpinnings. Finally, this work engages with epistemological issues which never have been addressed as such in the Northern Irish context: how do conflict settings affect the research undertaken on religion, when religion is an object of political and violent contentions? By analysing the scope for objective and critical thinking in such research context, this critical essay intends to contribute to a sociology of the sociology of religion.

This book unfolds an exploratory journey intended to scrutinise the suitability of entanglements and relations as a mode of thinking and seeing peacebuilding events. Through a reflection upon the UN's limited results in the endeavour towards securing lasting peace in war-torn scenarios, Torrent critically engages with three relevant debates in contemporary peacebuilding literature, including the inclusion of 'the locals', the achievement of organisational system-wide coherence and the increasingly questioned agential condition of peacebuilding actors. Inattentive to the relational vulnerability of involved stakeholders, it is suggested that the UN seeks to secure a totalising modern distory, defined in the book as a story that undoes other stories. Whilst affirming the entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes in the conflict-affected configuration, Entangled Peace also delves into a cautionary argument about what the author refers to as entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, normative, deterministic and exclusionary projection of a relational world. Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, Entangled Peace is an invitation to speculate over the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader theatre of the real, as radical openness, in which events emanate from the collision of an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds.

"Jenkins' rare combination of psychological theorizing and archival research in several countries and time periods yields a fascinating new take on the central question of when states over-estimate or under-estimate others' resolve. The biases that leaders and elites fall prey to appear to vary with their emotional states and senses of well-being, factors that most scholars have ignored."-Robert Jervis, author of How Statesmen Think This groundbreaking book explains how the happiness levels of leaders, politicians and diplomats affect their assessments of the resolve of their state's adversaries and allies. Its innovative methodology includes case studies of the origins of twelve wars with Anglo-American involvement from 1853 to 2003 and the psycholinguistic text mining of the British Hansard and the U.S. Congressional Record.

This edited collection explores how East Asia's painful history continues to haunt the relationships between its countries and peoples. Through a largely social-psychological and constructivist lens, the authors examine the ways in which historical memory and unmet identity needs generates mutual suspicion, xenophobic nationalism and tensions in the bilateral and trilateral relationships within the region. This text not only addresses some of the domestic drivers of Japanese, Chinese and South Korean foreign policy - and the implications of increasingly autocratic rule in all three countries - but also analyses the way in which new security mechanisms and processes advancing trust, confidence and reconciliation can replace those generating mistrust, antagonism and insecurity.

This book provides a holistic view on the topics of peace and conflict, peace education, international relations and regional studies during the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. It collects the studies, experience and analysis of faculty members of the University for Peace presented in three sections: regional and institutional outlook, and common challenges and interventions. Some of the topics in this book include the complex concept of peace; governance and security in Africa; peace and conflict in the Middle East; maritime security conflicts in South China Sea, the European Union in a multipolar world, religious fundamentalism and violent extremism; food security, climate change; and participatory action research in the culture of peace. Scholars, capacity building trainers, policy makers, politicians, lawyers, and individuals interested in international affairs among others might find in this book a diverse academic source for further analysis in their respective fields.

This book describes the common pitfalls of U.S. military interventions in efforts at stabilization, which supports post-conflict societies by establishing stable governance, rule of law, a safe and secure environment, economic development and social well-being for all members of the population. These efforts are often unsuccessful and can even cause harm when mission teams do not understand both the populations with whom they are engaging and policymakers. The book recommends prioritizing a relational approach to stabilization with a professional and well-resourced Civil Affairs and strategic intelligence approach to engagements over the current preference for transactional, often lethal operations.

This book offers new insights and original empirical research on private military and security companies (PMSCs), including China's negotiation approach to governance, an account of Nigeria's first engagement with regulatory cooperation under the threat of Boko Haram, and a study of PMSCs in Ebola-hit Western Africa. The author engages with concepts and theories from IR, Political Economy, and African studies-like regime, forum shopping, and extraversion-to describe what shapes state choices in national and international fora. The volume clarifies and spells out the needed questions and definitions and proposes a synthesis of how regime formation is shaped by ideas, interests, and institutions, starting from the proposition that regulatory cooperation consists in facilitating the acceptance and use of a single identifier for private military and security companies.

War crimes have devastating effects on victims and perpetrators and endanger broader political and military goals. The protection of civilians, one of the most fundamental norms in the laws of war, appears to have weakened despite almost universal international agreement. Using insights from organizational theory, this book seeks to understand the process between military socialization and unit participation in war crimes. How do militaries train their soldiers in the laws of war? How do they enforce compliance with these laws? Drawing on evidence from the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, and the Canadian peacekeeping mission in Somalia, the author discovers that military efforts to train soldiers about the laws of war are poor and leadership often sent mixed signals about the importance of compliance. However, units that developed subcultures that embraced these laws and had strong leadership were more likely to comply than those with weak discipline or countercultural norms.

The 2015 edition of the Global Burden of Armed Violence provides a wealth of data relevant to security and the post-2015 sustainable development framework. It estimates that 508,000 people died violently - in both conflict and non-conflict settings - every year in 2007–12, down from 526,000 in 2004–09. This trend is visible in non-conflict settings, where the proportion of women and girls is also slightly reduced, from 17 to 16 per cent. Yet, the number of direct conflict deaths is on the rise: from 55,000 to 70,000 per year over the same periods. Firearms are used in close to half of all homicides committed and in almost one-third of direct conflict deaths. Nearly USD 2 trillion in global homicide-related economic losses could have been saved if the homicide rate in 2000–10 had been reduced to the lowest practically attainable levels - between 2 and 3 deaths per 100,000 population.

This book offers a comprehensive practitioner's guide to negotiating at the United Nations. Although much of the content can be applied broadly, the guide focuses on navigating multilateral negotiations at the UN. The book is a tool to help new UN negotiators, explaining basic negotiation concepts and offering insight into the complexities of the UN system. It also offers a playbook for cooperation for negotiators at any level, exploring the dynamics of relationships and alliances, the art of chairing a negotiation, and the importance of balancing the power asymmetries present in any multilateral discussion. The book proposes improvements to the UN negotiation process and looks at the impact of information technologies on negotiation dynamics; it also shares stories from women UN delegates, illustrating what it means to be a female negotiator at the UN. This book is an exploration of the power of the individual in any negotiation, and of the responsibility all negotiators have in wielding that power to speak for a better world. This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy, global governance, foreign policy, and International Relations, as well as practitioners and policymakers.

This book discusses history of mental construction of the border between India and Bangladesh. It investigates how and when a border was constructed between the people, and discusses how the mental construction preceded the physical construction. It also examines the perils faced by those forced to leave their homes as a result of the partition of India in 1947. Globally throughout history, the absence of borders made the movement of people from one place to another easier. The construction of borders and sovereign de-limitation of territory restricted or even prevented seamless migration. The situation becomes more complex near borders that were previously open to the movement of people. One such border is between India and Bangladesh, where, in August 1947, suddenly people were told that the places they used to visit on a daily basis were now a part of a different sovereign country. This book argues that borders construct the identity of an individual or a group. Those who cross to the other side of border, for whatever reason, are identified and categorized by the state and the people. Sometimes these migrants face violence from the locals because they are considered a threat to the local working class. The book also explains how, after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, everyday encounter between people from India and Bangladesh have further embedded a feeling of us versus them. In 2015, India and Bangladesh agreed to implement the India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement (LBA). This book assesses whether the implementation of this agreement will have impacts on border-related problems like mobility, migration, and tensions. It is a valuable resource for policymakers, journalists, researchers and students.

This volume analyzes crises in International Relations (IR) in an innovative way. Rather than conceptualizing a crisis as something unexpected that has to be managed, the contributors argue that a crisis needs to be analyzed within a wider context of change: when new discourses are formed, communities are (re)built, and new identities emerge. Focusing on Ukraine, the book explore various questions related to crisis and change, including: How are crises culturally and socially constructed? How do issues of agency and structure come into play in Ukraine? Which subjectivities were brought into existence by Ukraine crisis discourses? Chapters explore the participation of women in Euromaidan, identity shifts in the Crimean Tatar community and diaspora politics, discourses related to corruption, anti-Soviet partisan warfare, and the annexation of Crimea, as well as long distance impacts of the crisis.

"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, UK This 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.

Starting from the key concept of geo-economics, this book investigates the new power politics and argues that the changing structural features of the contemporary international system are recasting the strategic imperatives of foreign policy practice. States increasingly practice power politics by economic means. Whether it is about Iran's nuclear programme or Russia's annexation of Crimea, Western states prefer economic sanctions to military force. Most rising powers have also become cunning agents of economic statecraft. China, for instance, is using finance, investment and trade as means to gain strategic influence and embed its global rise. Yet the way states use economic power to pursue strategic aims remains an understudied topic in International Political Economy and International Relations. The contributions to this volume assess geo-economics as a form of power politics. They show how power and security are no longer simply coupled to the physical control of territory by military means, but also to commanding and manipulating the economic binds that are decisive in today's globalised and highly interconnected world. Indeed, as the volume shows, the ability to wield economic power forms an essential means in the foreign policies of major powers. In so doing, the book challenges simplistic accounts of a return to traditional, military-driven geopolitics, while not succumbing to any unfounded idealism based on the supposedly stabilising effects of interdependence on international relations. As such, it advances our understanding of geo-economics as a strategic practice and as an innovative and timely analytical approach. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, international political economy, foreign policy and International Relations in general.

This edited volume offers an understanding of how the international community, as a collection of significant actors including major states and intergovernmental institutions, has responded to the important political and social development of the Arab Spring. Contributors analyze the response by international organizations (UN, EU, NATO), big powers (US, Russia, China, UK), regional powers (Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia) and small powers (Kuwait, Qatar). The book thus makes a sound contribution to the existing literature on the Arab Spring in form of foreign policy analysis and provides an overview of the current shape and outlook of global politics.

Africa has an unenviable record of 100 military coups in the past five decades, and that may not be the last count. The military still holds power in Guinea and Mauritania, while their incursion saw the assassination of President Joao Bernardo Vieira of Guinea-Bissau in March 2009. Fifteen of the 53 African leaders came to power by the force of arm; 23 have been on the throne for more than 10 years. The undemocratic inheritance left behind by military dictators and authoritarian one-party, sit-tight presidents, remain major sources of armed conflicts and civil wars that have claimed well over 20 million lives. The continent has a deluge of 3 million refugees. Out of the 23.7 million IDPs worldwide, 12.6 million are in Africa. Africa: Conflict Resolution And International Diplomacy, reflects on contending issues in contemporary African politics, examines Africa's crisis flash-points and traces various diplomatic initiatives taken by the international community; the UN, AU, EU, the G8, African regional communities and NGOs to ensure peace and stability. Seen purely from an African perspective, Ifeoha Azikiwe delves into the origin, the immediate and remote causes of these conflicts, as well as their cumulative effects and proffers short and long-term preventive measures. He foresees new conflicts erupting from desperate attempts to promote and institutionalise "democratic monarchy" - a recipe for future conflicts. Looking forward, he concludes by highlighting current initiatives, economic and political strategies that could fast-track the process towards full continental integration and formation of a "United States of Africa." Although a number of issues raised in the book may seem unpalatable, the author believes that the time has come to tell us some basic truth, if only to curb excessive impunity, uncanny democratic practices, external manipulations and neo-colonial tendencies that exacerbate conflicts in Africa.

This book provides the first comparative treatment of the roles of informal ad hoc groupings of states within selected conflict settings and their effects on governance in and out of the UN Security Council. Since the 1990s, informal institutions such as groups of friends, and contact or core groups have proliferated as instruments for the management of risk and conflict due to the increasing demands on the UN Security Council to adapt to the new post-cold war security environment. The perception of both the capacity and limits of the Security Council has had a catalytic effect on the creation of these ad hoc mechanisms. The substance of conflict resolution and the process of its legitimation tend to become increasingly detached, with the former being delegated to informal groups or coalition of states, while the Security Council provides the latter. The successful merger of right process and substantive outcome may strengthen the legitimacy of the Council and make actions taken by informal institutions more acceptable. This book seeks to establish the importance of informal ad hoc groupings of states in the making of peace. The dynamics between informal institutions and the Security Council are closely examined in the context of conflict resolution in Namibia, El Salvador, and Kosovo. The study illustrates the changing role of the Council in the maintenance of international peace and security. The decentralization of tasks to informal groups allows the achievement of policy goals that would be unattainable in the centralized setting of formal international organizations. In effect, informal institutions are agents of incremental change.

The relationship between Israel, American Jews, and the peace process has been a subject of passionate debate among scholars, political activists, and lay observers alike. This book is the first rigorous attempt to chart the impact of the peace process on the American Jewish community and its relationship with Israel, as mediated by the changing identity needs of American Jews. Overall, the trajectory of this relationship has been from a wide consensus of support for Israeli foreign policy, toward increasing polarization.

On one side is the peace camp composed mainly of those whose Jewish-American identity is based on a religious-universalistic definition of Judaism; on the other, those who identify as nationalistic, or orthodox in religious terms, and support a hard-line vision of Greater Israel. The acrimony between the two, combined with demographic change, has undermined Israel as a symbol of Jewish identity in America, and impeded effective lobbying for Israel.