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Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This Advanced Introduction establishes the study of peace processes as part of the mainstream of sociology, a position consistent with the new moral re-enchantment of the social sciences. It advances a sociological view of peace that goes beyond vague notions of reconciliation, to constitute the restoration of moral sensibility, from which flows social solidarity, sociability and social justice. These concepts form the basis for a moral framework outlining what peace means sociologically. Key features include: Establishing the study of peace and peace processes within the core of the sociological imagination A sociological approach to post-conflict emotions, compromise, everyday life peacebuilding, and personal trauma An innovative analysis that highlights recent developments and key areas of interest for researchers. Invigorating and timely, this will be a critical read for undergraduate and postgraduate students of peace studies, the sociology of conflict, and the sociology of war and violence. It will also appeal to higher level students and researchers in these areas.
Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This Advanced Introduction establishes the study of peace processes as part of the mainstream of sociology, a position consistent with the new moral re-enchantment of the social sciences. It advances a sociological view of peace that goes beyond vague notions of reconciliation, to constitute the restoration of moral sensibility, from which flows social solidarity, sociability and social justice. These concepts form the basis for a moral framework outlining what peace means sociologically. Key features include: Establishing the study of peace and peace processes within the core of the sociological imagination A sociological approach to post-conflict emotions, compromise, everyday life peacebuilding, and personal trauma An innovative analysis that highlights recent developments and key areas of interest for researchers. Invigorating and timely, this will be a critical read for undergraduate and postgraduate students of peace studies, the sociology of conflict, and the sociology of war and violence. It will also appeal to higher level students and researchers in these areas.
This book develops the discourse on the experiences of ex-combatants and their transition from war to peace, from the perspective of scholars across disciplines. Ex-combatants are often overlooked and ignored in the post-conflict search for memory and understanding, resulting in their voice being excluded or distorted. This collection seeks to disclose something of the lived experience of ex-combatants who have made the transition from war to peace to help to understand some of the difficulties they have encountered in social and emotional reintegration in the wake of combat. These include: motivations and mobilizations to participation in military struggle; the material difficulties experienced in social reintegration after the war; the emotional legacies of conflict; the discourses they utilize to reconcile their past in a society moving forward from conflict toward peace; and ex-combatants' subsequent engagement - or not - in peacebuilding. It also examines the contributions that former combatants have made to post-conflict compromise, reconciliation and peacebuilding. It focusses on male non-state actors, women, child soldiers and, unusually, state veterans, and complements previous volumes which captured the voices of victims in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka. This volume speaks to those working in the areas of sociology, criminology, security studies, politics, and international relations, and professionals working in social justice and human rights NGOs.
This book uses in-depth interview data with victims of conflict in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka to offer a new, sociological conceptualization of everyday life peacebuilding. It argues that sociological ideas about the nature of everyday life complement and supplement the concept of everyday life peacebuilding recently theorized within International Relations Studies (IRS). It claims that IRS misunderstands the nature of everyday life by seeing it only as a particular space where mundane, routine and ordinary peacebuilding activities are accomplished. Sociology sees everyday life also as a mode of reasoning. By exploring victims' ways of thinking and understanding, this book argues that we can better locate their accomplishment of peacebuilding as an ordinary activity. The book is based on six years of empirical research in three different conflict zones and reports on a wealth of interview data to support its theoretical arguments. This data serves to give voice to victims who are otherwise neglected and marginalized in peace processes.
The volume assesses whether or not South Africa can achieve peace and stability following the violence, chaos and disorder that has accompanied the transition from apartheid. Some chapters examine important aspects which define the current period of chaos in order to evaluate the prospects of the disorder coming to an end. Others address key areas of reform by which peace and stability could be restored in order to assess the likelihood of this being acheived.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. What is the purpose of social science? How can social science make itself relevant to the intractable problems facing humanity in the twenty-first century? The social sciences are under threat from two main sources. One is external, reflected in a global university crisis that imposes the marketization of higher education on the ancient practice of scholarship. The other, internal threat is social science's withdrawal from publicly-engaged teaching and research into the protective bunker of disciplinarity. In articulating a vision for the public role of social science in the twenty-first century, John Brewer argues that these threats also constitute an opportunity for a new public social science to emerge, confident in its public value and fully engaged with the future of humanity in its teaching, research and civic responsibilities, while also remaining committed to science. The argument is presented in the form of an interpretive essay: thought-provoking, forward-looking, and challenging to intellectual orthodoxy. It should be read and debated by all researchers and teachers in the social science disciplines who are concerned by the future of higher education and the relevance of their subjects to the future of humankind.
This book introduces a new and original sociological conceptualization of compromise after conflict and is based on six-years of study amongst victims of conflict in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka, with case studies from Sierra Leone and Colombia. A sociological approach to compromise is contrasted with approaches in Moral and Political Philosophy and is evaluated for its theoretical utility and empirical robustness with in-depth interview data from victims of conflicts around the globe. The individual chapters are written to illustrate, evaluate and test the conceptualization using the victim data, and an afterword reflects on the new empirical agenda in victim research opened up by a sociological approach to compromise. This volume is part of a larger series of works from a programme advancing a sociological approach to peace processes with a view to seeing how orthodox approaches within International Relations and Political Science are illuminated by the application of the sociological imagination.
This book develops the discourse on the experiences of ex-combatants and their transition from war to peace, from the perspective of scholars across disciplines. Ex-combatants are often overlooked and ignored in the post-conflict search for memory and understanding, resulting in their voice being excluded or distorted. This collection seeks to disclose something of the lived experience of ex-combatants who have made the transition from war to peace to help to understand some of the difficulties they have encountered in social and emotional reintegration in the wake of combat. These include: motivations and mobilizations to participation in military struggle; the material difficulties experienced in social reintegration after the war; the emotional legacies of conflict; the discourses they utilize to reconcile their past in a society moving forward from conflict toward peace; and ex-combatants' subsequent engagement - or not - in peacebuilding. It also examines the contributions that former combatants have made to post-conflict compromise, reconciliation and peacebuilding. It focusses on male non-state actors, women, child soldiers and, unusually, state veterans, and complements previous volumes which captured the voices of victims in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka. This volume speaks to those working in the areas of sociology, criminology, security studies, politics, and international relations, and professionals working in social justice and human rights NGOs.
This book introduces a new and original sociological conceptualization of compromise after conflict and is based on six-years of study amongst victims of conflict in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka, with case studies from Sierra Leone and Colombia. A sociological approach to compromise is contrasted with approaches in Moral and Political Philosophy and is evaluated for its theoretical utility and empirical robustness with in-depth interview data from victims of conflicts around the globe. The individual chapters are written to illustrate, evaluate and test the conceptualization using the victim data, and an afterword reflects on the new empirical agenda in victim research opened up by a sociological approach to compromise. This volume is part of a larger series of works from a programme advancing a sociological approach to peace processes with a view to seeing how orthodox approaches within International Relations and Political Science are illuminated by the application of the sociological imagination.
This book uses in-depth interview data with victims of conflict in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka to offer a new, sociological conceptualization of everyday life peacebuilding. It argues that sociological ideas about the nature of everyday life complement and supplement the concept of everyday life peacebuilding recently theorized within International Relations Studies (IRS). It claims that IRS misunderstands the nature of everyday life by seeing it only as a particular space where mundane, routine and ordinary peacebuilding activities are accomplished. Sociology sees everyday life also as a mode of reasoning. By exploring victims' ways of thinking and understanding, this book argues that we can better locate their accomplishment of peacebuilding as an ordinary activity. The book is based on six years of empirical research in three different conflict zones and reports on a wealth of interview data to support its theoretical arguments. This data serves to give voice to victims who are otherwise neglected and marginalized in peace processes.
Religion was thought to be part of the problem in Ireland and
incapable of turning itself into part of the solution. Many
commentators deny the churches a role in Northern Ireland's peace
process or belittle it, focusing on the few well-known events of
church involvement and the small number of high profile religious
peacebuilders. This new study seeks to correct various
misapprehensions about the role of the churches by pointing to
their major achievements in both the social and political
dimensions of the peace process, by small-scale, lesser-known
religious peacebuilders as well as major players. The churches are
not treated lightly or sentimentally and major weaknesses in their
contribution are highlighted. The study challenges the view that
ecumenism was the main religious driver of the peace process,
focusing instead on the role of evangelicals, it warns against
romanticising civil society, pointing to its regressive aspects and
counter-productive activities, and queries the relevance of the
idea of 'spiritual capital' to understanding the role of the
churches in post-conflict reconstruction, which the churches
largely ignore.
Are police forces agents of the state or of society? How do different police forces maintain order? How does the nature of a country's political system affect the state's reaction to disorder? This study identifies trends in public-order policing across a broad sample of seven countries: Britain, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, the United States of America, Israel, South Africa and China. It explains why the handling of disorder has become a controversial and topical issue in different parts of the world. Each chapter provides a range of data on the size, make-up and cost of the police and follows a common format in analysing the place of the police at the junction of state-society relations.
The volume assesses whether or not South Africa can achieve peace and stability following the violence, chaos and disorder that has accompanied the transition from apartheid. Some chapters examine important aspects which define the current period of chaos in order to evaluate the prospects of the disorder coming to an end. Others address key areas of reform by which peace and stability could be restored in order to assess the likelihood of this being acheived.
This book establishes Ireland's unique contribution to criminological research, addressing the effects on crime of its peculiar patterns of industrialization and social change, as well as the effect on ordinary crime of a quarter of a century of civil unrest and terrorism. Crime trends are explored over a fifty-year period between 1945-95 at the national level for the two countries as a whole, and at a city level for Belfast and Dublin. Trends in specific categories of crime, from murder to rape and drug crime, are also explored over the same period. The book makes a significant contribution by supplementing statistical material with ethnographic data. It reports on in-depth interview material among residents in two areas of Belfast, one in largely Catholic West Belfast and the other in largely Protestant East Belfast. In these interviews, those questioned speak of their own experiences of crime, the police, and the paramilitary organizations.
Religion was thought to be part of the problem in Ireland and incapable of turning itself into part of the solution. Many commentators deny the churches a role in Northern Ireland's peace process or belittle it, focusing on the few well-known events of church involvement and the small number of high profile religious peacebuilders. This new study seeks to correct various misapprehensions about the role of the churches by pointing to their major achievements in both the social and political dimensions of the peace process, by small-scale, lesser-known religious peacebuilders as well as major players. The churches are not treated lightly or sentimentally and major weaknesses in their contribution are highlighted. The study challenges the view that ecumenism was the main religious driver of the peace process, focusing instead on the role of evangelicals, it warns against romanticising civil society, pointing to its regressive aspects and counter-productive activities, and queries the relevance of the idea of 'spiritual capital' to understanding the role of the churches in post-conflict reconstruction, which the churches largely ignore. This book is written by three 'insiders' to church peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, who bring their insight and expertise as sociologists to bear in their analysis of four-years in-depth interviewing with a wide cross section of people involved in the peace process, including church leaders and rank-and-file, members of political parties, prime ministers, paramilitary organisations, community development and civil society groups, as well as government politicians and advisors. Many of these are speaking for the first time about the role of religious peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, and doing so with remarkable candour. The volume allows the Northern Irish case study to speak to other conflicts where religion is thought to be problematic by developing a conceptual framework to understand religious peacebuilding.
The South African Police Force is among the world's most controversial police forces, plagued by allegations of misconduct and archaic methods. John Brewer places these problems in their historical context through this detailed study of the origins and development of policing in South Africa. Brewer sees a major problem in the lack of modernization: long after similar forces around the world had been modernized, South African Police continued to discharge a colonial role, using policing methods and styles suitable for the nineteenth century. Brewer eloquently links this lack of modernization and development to the South African state's need for a police force to uphold and implement its policies of internal colonialism. He argues further that this is the source of the close relationship between the police and state in South Africa. Now that the South African government has been transformed, the police force must adapt. Brewer concludes with a discussion of reform and warns that it will be severely constrained if it fails to transcend its colonial origins.
Drawing from authors John Brewer and Albert Hunter's original work published in 1989, when single method research was the standard, this new text offers an explanation of how a planned synthesis of various research techniques such as fieldwork, surveys, experiments, and nonreactive studies can be purposely used to improve social science knowledge. Foundations of Multimethod Research: Synthesizing Styles explores the many aspects of the multimethod research approach, including the formulation of research problems, data collection, sampling and generalization, measurement, reliability and validity, hyposthesis testing and causal analysis, and writing and publicizing results. Key Features: Provides a history of multimethod research as a post-positivist approach to give an accurate understanding of the emergence of this technique Compares and contrasts the major primary research methods to help students determine which multiple methods are suitable for their own research Addresses the post-modern critique of science and reviews how it has been articulated recently to examine how it is evaluated today Includes examples of research designs from academic journals so that students can see how formal results are written This book is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate research methods courses across the social and behavioral sciences. It is a must-read for anyone looking to gain a better conceptual understanding of how to do social and behavioral science research more effectively. "This is a book I wish I had written. Although nearly every page contains an interesting methodological insight, it's the synthesizing nature of the multimethod perspective that I find most satisfying. Instead of a patchwork of precepts and procedures, Professors Brewer and Hunter present a coherent synthesis of the principal quantitative and qualitative research styles." -- Kenneth O. Doyle, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities "This is a superb resource for anyone undertaking research in the social sciences. Going beyond simple descriptions of how to use each of the individual methods, Brewer and Hunter provide compelling arguments for systematically synthesizing different research styles at each stage of the research process. In doing so, they help us to see social science research as both an art and a science. By focusing our attention on how a multimethod approach can enhance each stage of the research, they avoid the simplistic dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative research and provide us with a much more sophisticated way of looking at the multimethod approach." -- Sue R. Faerman, University at Albany-SUNY
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. What is the purpose of social science? How can social science make itself relevant to the intractable problems facing humanity in the twenty-first century? The social sciences are under threat from two main sources. One is external, reflected in a global university crisis that imposes the marketization of higher education on the ancient practice of scholarship. The other, internal threat is social science's withdrawal from publicly-engaged teaching and research into the protective bunker of disciplinarity. In articulating a vision for the public role of social science in the twenty-first century, John Brewer argues that these threats also constitute an opportunity for a new public social science to emerge, confident in its public value and fully engaged with the future of humanity in its teaching, research and civic responsibilities, while also remaining committed to science. The argument is presented in the form of an interpretive essay: thought-provoking, forward-looking, and challenging to intellectual orthodoxy. It should be read and debated by all researchers and teachers in the social science disciplines who are concerned by the future of higher education and the relevance of their subjects to the future of humankind.
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