This book tells the story of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, an emblematic grassroots social movement of peasant farmers, who unusually declared themselves 'neutral' to Colombia's internal armed conflict, in the north-west region of Uraba. It reveals two core narratives in the Community's collective identity, which Burnyeat calls the 'radical' and the 'organic' narratives. These refer to the historically-constituted interpretative frameworks according to which they perceive respectively the Colombian state, and their relationship with their natural and social environments. Together, these two narratives form an 'Alternative Community' collective identity, comprising a distinctive conception of grassroots peace-building. This study, centered on the Community's socio-economic cacao-farming project, offers an innovative way of approaching victims' organizations and social movements through critical, post-modern politics and anthropology. It will become essential reading to Latin American ethnographers and historians, and all interested in conflict resolution and transitional justice. Read the author's blog drawing on the book here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2018/06/07/colombias-unsung-heroes/

The Fetish of Peace: The Myth of Transformational Peace is a critical theoretical exploration of the ways in which the concept of peace is utilized and managed by the international arena and statist systems, distinctive in that the concept of peace is consistently employed in various performances by the state, and international systems, to address serious issues/problems in the international community. Despite all the rhetoric of peace and actions taken in the name of peace, we find ourselves within the same cycle of violence.

This book traces the trajectory and different meanings of the concept of peacebuilding in the United Nations since the early 1990s. It analyses how that concept gained life in a particular context and the implications of this process for the Organisation's support to societies affected by armed conflict in general and for peace operations in particular. Departing from tenets about the influence of ideas in world politics and engaging with the critique of the liberal peace scholarship, the book provides a theoretically informed narrative of how peacebuilding acquired different meanings while remaining largely motivated, justified, legitimated and informed by a proactive and top-down agenda of promoting liberal democratic institutions, norms and values as a remedy to the challenges faced by societies affected by armed conflict. The book will appeal to scholars, policymakers and practitioners in peacebuilding and post-conflict development.

War termination reflects a civil-military bargain and affects relevant decisions made by political leaders. For the leader embroiled in protracted war, this risk dictates whether he or she will commit more resources to the fight or else cut the state's losses and get out.

This volume explores the repercussions of a changing world order on regional security in Latin America. It examines how global and regional power shifts impact on the evolution of regional institutions as well as on state policies adopted in response to regional security challenges such as border conflicts, political instability, migration, drug-trafficking, organized crime, and terrorism. Contributions to this volume analyze the topic from three angles: power dynamics and its effects on regional security governance; the contribution of regional institutions to the management of security challenges; and the impact of power dynamics on states' shifting security priorities. Written by specialists from Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, the United States and Europe, the chapters weave theory and case studies to provide a rich description of the impact of power and politics on regional security in Latin America. This book is an invaluable resource for students, scholars and practitioners interested in Latin American politics, regional cooperation, and war and conflict studies, as well as international security and international relations in general.

War and conflict are a reality of life throughout the world. While much is written about the impact of violence and disorder, how people and organisations adapt to these environments is poorly understood. This book tells the often hidden story of people managing, delivering services and sustaining economies through and beyond violent conflict. It is written for both general readers and academic specialists, combining first person interviews, insights from 'witness seminars; and informal conversations with more scholarly research. Building on what we already know about organisational behavior and conflict transformation, the book looks at the delivery of housing and public amenities, the management of public space and commemoration and the role of local businesses during and beyond violent conflict. In particular, it focuses on the role of organisational managers as peacebuilding entrepreneurs, generating and sustaining conflict transformation efforts.

This book tells the story of the United States' relationship with the Taliban from the start of the Taliban movement until its retreat from Kabul in the face of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The US and the Taliban held countless meetings, but could never come to a workable arrangement, and this book examines both why diplomatic recognition was so important to the Taliban government and why the US refused to recognize it. It presents a concise, readable, and interesting perspective on US/Taliban relations from the fall of Kabul in 1996 until the fall of Kabul in 2001.

Recognition is often considered a means to de-escalate conflicts and promote peaceful social interactions. This volume explores the forms that social recognition and its withholding may take in asymmetric armed conflicts, examining the risks and opportunities that arise when local, state, and transnational actors recognise, misrecognise, or deny recognition of armed non-state actors. By studying key asymmetric conflicts through the prism of recognition, it offers an innovative perspective on the interactions between armed non-state actors and state actors. In what contexts does granting recognition to armed non-state actors foster conflict transformation? What happens when governments withhold recognition or label armed non-state actors in ways they perceive as misrecognition? The authors examine the ambivalence of recognition processes in violent conflicts and their sometimes-unintended consequences. The volume shows that, while non-recognition prevents conflict transformation, the recognition of armed non-state actors may produce counterproductive precedents and new modes of exclusion in intra-state and transnational politics. -- .

Sovereignty is a significant force regarding the ownership, use, protection and management of natural resources. By placing an emphasis on the complex intertwined relationship between natural resources and diverse claims to resource sovereignty, this book reveals the backstory of contemporary resource contestations in Latin America and their positioning within a more extensive history of extraction in the region. Exploring cases of resource contestation in Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala, Sovereign Forces highlights the value of these relationships to the practice of environmental governance and peacebuilding in the region.

Proscribing peace offers a systematic examination of the impact of proscription on peace negotiations. With rare access to actors during the Colombian negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People's Army (FARC), Sophie Haspeslagh shows how proscription makes negotiations harder and more prolonged. By introducing the concept of 'linguistic ceasefire', Haspeslagh adds to our understanding of the timing and sequencing of peace processes in the context of proscription. Linguistic ceasefire has three main components: first, recognise the conflict; second, discard the 'terrorist' label, and third, uncouple the act and the actor. These measures remove the symbolic impact of proscription, even where de-listing is not possible ahead of negotiations. With relevance for more than half of the conflicts around the world in which an armed group is listed as a terrorist organisation, 'linguistic ceasefire' helps to explain why certain conflicts remain stuck in the 'terrorist' framing, while others emerge from it. International proscription regimes criminalise both the actor and the act of terrorism. Proscribing peace calls for an end to the amalgamation between acts and actors. By focussing on the acts instead, Haspeslagh argues, international policy would be better able to consider the violent actions both of armed groups and those of the state. By separating the act and the actor, change - and thus peace - become possible. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16, Peace, justice and strong institutions -- .

This book argues that river basins represent a particular structural setting in international relations with the potential for generating a dynamic of cooperation among the involved countries. The volume applies the concept of regional cooperation to international river basins to highlight their relevance as a particular space in international relations, emphasising both the inter-connectivity and transnationalism of international river basins. It addresses the challenges related to resource distribution between up and down stream countries, showcasing a variety of examples of cooperation and conflictual relations within various international river basins. Case studies are drawn from across the globe and include the Mekong, the Indus, the Euphrates-Tigris and the Danube international river basins. Each chapter outlines the different aspects which support or undermine cooperation in each case, taking into consideration key areas surrounding resource sharing, national development, environmental considerations and national security. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars with an interest in international river basins, regional cooperation, water resource competition, international relations and environmental politics.

This book discusses terrorism and the rise of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India and examines how this movement has become a threat to democracy in that country. The work analyses the rise of Hindu nationalism, culminating in the success of Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political arm of the movement, in the 2019 Indian national elections. It offers an accessible account of the complexities and subtleties of Hindu nationalism and the dangers it poses to India's pluralistic democracy and secularism. A major theme of the book is the role that terrorism has played in the rise of Hindu nationalism, a factor often underplayed or ignored in other studies, and it also challenges the widespread belief that terrorism is largely an Islamic phenomenon. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach, the book is highly relevant to both academics and policymakers, given India's importance as a major global economic and military power. This book will be of interest to students of terrorism and political violence, South Asian history, Indian politics and International Relations, as well as policymakers.

Combining conflict studies and feminist perspectives on everyday violence, this book analyses games and push-backs, which are vectors to migrants' border crossing attempts and violence that aims to deter their journeys at the Bosnian-Croatian border. It questions how these diverse forms of violence are experienced, not treating violence as singular episodes but rather paying attention to how migrants make meaning of it across months and years. The author examines direct violence and its symbiosis with structural harms and questions how these turn into an everyday, concrete, and intimate processes at the border. She also questions who this violence targets, where it takes place, and asks whether and how the dominant assumptions about race and gender impact men's migration journeys. The book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students interested in issues of migration, violence, masculinities, racialization, the European Union's border governance, and scholar activism.

This book examines the origins of the US Navy’s 2007 Maritime Strategy, the formation of the US government’s “Pivot to Asia� strategy, and the most recent revisions to this strategy that focus more specifically on China. Besides examining the details of this strategy formulation, the book explores the internal and external repercussions on the US Navy of the Pivot to Asia. It discusses the “Fat Leonard� scandal, which involved bribery and corruption in contracts for the maintenance of the US fleets in the region, and considers the sharp decrease in training and readiness of the Pacific fleet to support the pivot, which in turn led to serious maritime collisions. It also assesses the impact of the pivot on other countries in the region, engaging in the debate as to whether the pivot was necessary in order to convince the countries of the region that the United States had not lost its staying power, or whether the pivot managed to make tensions in the Asia-Pacific worse even while allowing the strategic situation in the Middle East and Europe to worsen as a result of neglect.

Like shifting sands of a desert, the global nuclear landscape changes every few years across its three main constituents - nuclear energy, non-proliferation and disarmament. Each of these has seen phases of cautious optimism, deep scepticism and outright pessimism over the last two decades. This book offers a bird's eye view on all the three, even as the individual authors offer a worm's eye view on each specific topic within the larger ambit. The first section of the book examines developments in the nuclear energy sector. The second part of the book is devoted to non-proliferation. The last section of the book examines the consequences of use of nuclear weapons, concepts of CBMs and arms control, and recent disarmament initiatives. A tentative exploration of the prospects of disarmament in the wake of Russia-Ukraine conflict is also undertaken. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

This book is a concise and accessible introduction to the problem of war crimes in modern history, emphasizing the development of laws aimed at regulating the conduct of armed conflict developed from the 19th Century to the present. Bringing together multiple strands of recent research in history, political science, and law the book starts with an overview of the attempts across the pre-modern world to regulate the initiation, conduct, and outcomes of war. It them moves on to present a survey of the legal revolution of the 19th Century when, amidst a global welter of colonial wars, the first body of formal codes and laws relating to distinguishing legal from criminal conduct in war was developed. Further chapters investigate failed but influential attempts to develop the laws of war in the post-World War I period, summarize the major landmarks in international law related to war crimes, such as the Hague conventions and the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, as well as hundreds of lesser-known post-World War II trials in Europe and Asia. It also looks at the origins and debated significance of the Genocide Convention of 1948 and the 1949 Geneva Conventions accounts for the acceleration worldwide of war crimes investigations and trials from the 1970s into the 2000s and summarizes current thinking about international law and the rapidly changing nature of warfare worldwide as well as the memorialization of war crimes. Including images, documents, a bibliography highlighting the most recent scholarship, a chronology, who's who, and a glossary, this is the perfect introduction for those wishing to understand the complex field or war crimes history and its politics.

This path-breaking book uncovers the important, under-appreciated role of armed opposition groups turned political parties in shaping long-term patterns of politics after war. Based on an empirically grounded and theoretically informed retrospective on nearly thirty years of post-conflict democratic state-building efforts, it examines whether this practice has contributed to peace and finds that engaging post-rebel parties in electoral politics has proven to be a viable long-term strategy for bringing political stability, that disparate post-rebel parties from different political contexts invest heavily in electoral politics and that few post-rebel parties actively seek return to civil conflict as a solution after becoming a political party. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in democracy, governance, elections, political parties, post-conflict peacebuilding, and more broadly to international relations, comparative politics, and regional politics.

Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers a series of conceptual and applied frameworks to help understand the role cultural heritage plays within conflict and the potential it has to contribute to positive peacebuilding and sustainable development in post-conflict societies. Designed as a resource guide, this general volume introduces the multiple roles cultural heritage plays through the conflict cycle from its onset, subsequent escalation and through to resolution and recovery. In its broadest sense it questions what role cultural heritage plays within conflict, how cultural heritage is used in the construction and justification of conflict narratives and how are these narratives framed and often manipulated to support particular perspectives, and how we can develop better understandings of cultural heritage and work towards the better protection of cultural heritage resources during conflict. It moves beyond the protection paradigm and recognises that cultural heritage can contribute to building peace and reconciliation in post-conflict environments. The study offers a conceptual and operational framework to understand the roles cultural heritage plays within conflict cycles, how it can be targeted during war, and the potential cultural heritage has in positive peacebuilding across the conflict lifecycle. Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers an invaluable introduction to cultural heritage at all stages in conflict scenarios which will benefit students, researchers and practitioners in the field of heritage, environment, peace and conflict studies.

Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers a series of conceptual and applied frameworks to help understand the role cultural heritage plays within conflict and the potential it has to contribute to positive peacebuilding and sustainable development in post-conflict societies. Designed as a resource guide, this general volume introduces the multiple roles cultural heritage plays through the conflict cycle from its onset, subsequent escalation and through to resolution and recovery. In its broadest sense it questions what role cultural heritage plays within conflict, how cultural heritage is used in the construction and justification of conflict narratives and how are these narratives framed and often manipulated to support particular perspectives, and how we can develop better understandings of cultural heritage and work towards the better protection of cultural heritage resources during conflict. It moves beyond the protection paradigm and recognises that cultural heritage can contribute to building peace and reconciliation in post-conflict environments. The study offers a conceptual and operational framework to understand the roles cultural heritage plays within conflict cycles, how it can be targeted during war, and the potential cultural heritage has in positive peacebuilding across the conflict lifecycle. Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers an invaluable introduction to cultural heritage at all stages in conflict scenarios which will benefit students, researchers and practitioners in the field of heritage, environment, peace and conflict studies.

Tackling one of the most prevalent myths about insurgencies, this book examines and rebuts the popular belief that Mao Zedong created a fundamentally new form of warfare that transformed the nature of modern insurgency. The labeling of an insurgent enemy as using "Maoist Warfare" has been a common phenomenon since Mao's victory over the Guomindang in 1949, from Malaya and Vietnam during the Cold War to Afghanistan and Syria today. Yet, this practice is heavily flawed. This book argues that Mao did not invent a new breed of insurgency, failed to produce a coherent vision of how insurgencies should be fought, and was not influential in his impact upon subsequent insurgencies. Consequently, Mao's writings cannot be used to generate meaningful insights for understanding those insurgencies that came after him. This means that scholars and policymakers should stop using Mao as a tool for understanding insurgencies and as a straw man against whom to target counterinsurgency strategies.

This book focuses on the Mediterranean/MENA migration crisis and explores the human security implications for migrants and refugees in this troubled region. Since the Arab uprisings of 2010/2011, the Middle East and North Africa region has experienced major political transformations and called into question the legitimacy of states in the region. Displaced populations continue to suffer due to the major conflicts in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, causing fragmentation and dis-integration of communities. Contributors to this volume analyze how and why this crisis differs significantly from previous migration/refugee flows in the region, explain the historical and political antecedents of this crisis which have played a part in its shaping, and explore the relationship between human security and the protection of vulnerable individuals and groups.

This groundbreaking volume explores the concept of self-censorship as it relates to individuals and societies and functions as a barrier to peace. Defining self-censorship as the act of intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in the absence of formal obstacles, the volumes introduces self-censorship as one of the socio-psychological mechanisms that prevent the free flow of information and thus obstruct proper functioning of democratic societies. Moreover it analyzes this socio-psychological phenomenon specifically in the context of intractable conflict, providing much evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moving from the micro to the macro level, the collected chapters put the individual as the focal unit of psychological analysis while embedding the individual in multiple levels of context including families, organizations, and societies. Following a firm conceptual explanation of self-censorship, a selection of both emerging and prominent scholars describe the ways in which self-censorship factors into families, organizations, education, academia, and other settings. Further chapters discuss self-censorship in military contexts, narratives of political violence, and the media. Finally, the volume concludes by looking at the ways in which harmful self-censorship in societies can be overcome, and explores the future of self-censorship research. In doing so, this volume solidifies self-censorship as an important phenomenon of social behavior with major individual and collective consequences, while stimulating exciting and significant new research possibilities in the social and behavioral sciences. Conceptually carving out a new area in peace psychology, Self Censorship in Contexts of Peace and Conflict will appeal to psychologists, sociologists, peace researchers, political scientists, practitioners, and all those with a wish to understand the personal and societal functioning of individuals in the real world.

Bringing together established and emerging voices in Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), this book offers fresh and dynamic reflections on CTS and envisages possible lines of future research and ways forward. The volume is structured in three sections. The first opens a space for intellectual engagement with other disciplines such as Sociology, Peace Studies, Critical Pedagogy, and Indigenous Studies. The second looks at topics that have not received much attention within CTS, such as silences in discourses, the politics of counting dead bodies, temporality or anarchism. The third presents ways of 'performing' CTS through research-based artistic performances and productions. Overall, the volume opens up a space for broadening and pushing CTS forward in new and imaginative ways. This book will be of interest to students of critical terrorism studies, critical security studies, sociology and International Relations in general.

In Researching Yugoslavia and its Aftermath, a common thread is the authors' path through the time and space context in which fieldwork has taken place. Accordingly, this collection tackles problems that have always existed but have not been dealt with in a single volume. In particular, it examines a range of methodological questions arising from the contributors' shared concerns, and thus the obstacles and solutions characterising the relationship between researchers and their objects of study. Being an interdisciplinary project, this book brings together highly regarded historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, cultural and social theorists, as well as experts in architecture and communication studies. They share a belief that the awareness of the researcher's own position in fieldwork is a precondition of utmost significance to comprehend the evolution of objects of study, and hence to ensure transparency and ultimate credibility of the findings. Moreover, the contributors come from diverse backgrounds, including authors from the former Yugoslavia and others who have made their way to the region after starting their research careers; some from universities in the area, others from institutions in the Global North. Here, they explore cross-cutting issues such as the repercussions of gender, nationality, institutional affiliation and the consequences of their entry into the field. This is examined in terms of the results of the research and the ethical aspect of the relationship with the object of study, as well as the implications of the chosen time framework in the methodological design and the clash between this decision and the interests of the actors studied.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume discusses the effects, models and implications of history teaching in relation to conflict transformation and reconciliation from a social-psychological perspective. Bringing together a mix of established and young researchers and academics, from the fields of psychology, education, and history, the book provides an in-depth exploration of the role of historical narratives, history teaching, history textbooks and the work of civil society organizations in post-conflict societies undergoing reconciliation processes, and reflects on the state of the art at both the international and regional level. As well as dealing with the question of the 'perpetrator-victim' dynamic, the book also focuses on the particular context of transition in and out of cold war in Eastern Europe and the post-conflict settings of Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine and Cyprus. It is also exploring the pedagogical classroom practices of history teaching and a critical comparison of various possible approaches taken in educational praxis. The book will make compelling reading for students and researchers of education, history, sociology, peace and conflict studies and psychology.