Search

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Enforced disappearance is a human rights violation and crime widely used in repression and armed conflict contexts. The families of the forcibly disappeared are left in a state of ambiguous loss as they search for the disappeared to satisfy their right to truth and achieve healing and closure. However, there is limited knowledge of the obstacles that hinder the search in practice and of how families can best be supported when mobilizing in search processes. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, using insights from procedural justice research and qualitative interviews undertaken with families and other actors involved in supporting search processes in Colombia and El Salvador, we enhance and expand the scholarship that acknowledges the importance of victim participation and victims as key justice stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the official communication of the governments of El Salvador and Colombia to, and about, their diaspora communities. Through a qualitative content analysis of news releases, speeches, factsheets and other public information material, the themes used to 'construct' the image of the diaspora are explored, as well as the issues that these governments traditionally associate with their expatriates. The study also analyses the type of relationship described (that is, communal versus exchange), with its findings suggesting a typology of government-to-diaspora communication and a new category of relationship ('hybrid' relationships), which is detailed herein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The private sector plays a fundamental role in peace negotiations and in the implementation of agreements, as comparison between El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia indicates. However, private sector involvement in peace negotiations varies: Conflict cost perceptions, degrees of unity of the pro-peace business faction, and varied access to the peace policymaking process account for important differences across the cases. Thus this article points to the need to tine-tune our understanding of private sector behaviour in the context of armed conflict and peace and underscores how private sector characteristics and business-state relations affect the emergence of peace negotiations and shape resultant outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]