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Temporary collective relocation of former combatants in cantonments plays a vital role in Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) programmes. Existing research emphasizes the necessity of implementing limited-duration cantonments to mitigate potential security dilemmas. The 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) provides a unique experience, deviating from conventional practices by maintaining cantonments over an extended period, with some evolving into permanent settlements. What are the effects of this strategy on community-based reintegration? Drawing upon original data from interviews, ethnographic observation, and surveys conducted in conflict-affected communities, this paper compares two cases: a cantonment successfully transformed into a permanent settlement and another initially promising cantonment that ultimately failed to achieve permanence. This study argues that long-term cantonments contribute to community-based reintegration benefiting former combatants and receiving communities by maintaining internal cohesion, supporting the local economy, and rebuilding the social fabric in conflict-affected territories. However, specific conditions, particularly land ownership and security, are crucial for such a development. Without these conditions, long-term cantonments face the risk of being closed or relocated, threatening peacebuilding outcomes. The displacement of ex-combatants to other territories hinders community access to the benefits offered by the collective reintegration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives China's peace engagement in conflict-affected countries: does China provide peacebuilding support where its help is needed the most or to advance its own interests? Despite a growing body of literature addressing this question, the analytical scope remains limited to China's short-term peacebuilding measures and individual case studies. In this article, we build on longitudinal large-N data addressing China's long-term peacebuilding. We detect a strong association between Chinese peace engagement and the economic needs of recipients. Mixed results are obtained regarding the role of China's interests. While security and diplomatic interests appear to drive its peace engagement to some extent, there is no clear evidence of its economic interests influencing the engagement in conflict-affected countries. The article makes three contributions. First, we add to the growing literature on China's peace engagement by adopting a broad definition of peacebuilding and, by doing so, expanding the analytical scope. Second, we contribute to the literature on emerging peacebuilding actors drawing on the case of China. Last, we make a policy-relevant contribution by demonstrating the complexity of peacebuilding actors' motivation in engaging with conflict-affected countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper conducts a comparative analysis of EU (91 texts) and US (93 texts) discourses concerning post-peace accord Colombia (late 2016 to mid-2022). Employing a Bourdieu-influenced methodology, our proposal aims to reconcile Post-Development theories with International Relations research. This innovative and multidimensional approach illuminates both discursive continuities within Global North while concurrently providing a framework that allows to identify and interpret internal political divergences. Our findings highlight a shared commitment to a liberal conception of peacebuilding, alongside internal distinction strategies employed to legitimize respective policies towards Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As tourism is increasingly portrayed as a means for peacebuilding, the need to study its impact in conflict-ravaged areas has become more acute. Current debates on peace-through-tourism engage critically in such analyses, focusing further on the connection between tourism and socio-spatial (in)equalities, power (im)balances and everyday (in)securities as central elements in the study of peace. Yet the discussion still reinforces normative assumptions by tending to invariably associate community-based tourism with peace outcomes. Hence, paradox-ridden contexts where structural violence and oppression persist even in the presence of grassroots development receive considerably less attention. This article addresses this gap by discussing the case of Urabá, a Colombian region wracked by the armed conflict that has seen a rise in bottom-up tourism initiatives in recent years. Our findings suggest that, despite their perceived peacefulness, tourism spaces have become 'pockets of security' where the conditions enabling grassroots tourism are maintained as long as the legal and illegal power structures that are furthering dispossession in the region remain unchallenged. Drawing on insights from peace studies and human geography, we aim at contributing to the burgeoning body of research on peace tourism by proposing a more nuanced understanding of the linkages between tourism, violence, and the spatial reconfigurations that underlie the so-called post-conflict period. Ultimately, we want to encourage more critical analyses of the use of heart-winning discourses that could conceal violent geographies surrounding tourism spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions and Support (MAPS) dataset, which provides rich survey data from more than 12,000 respondents in Colombia. Our panel survey – carried out in two separate waves in 2019 and 2021 – is representative at the level of each 'Program for Development with a Territorial Focus' (PDET, for its acronym in Spanish), the most war-affected regions and those targeted for peace agreement implementation. We describe the sample and compare support for the peace agreement in MAPS to other recent surveys in Colombia, showing how MAPS reveals regional variation obscured in nationally representative surveys. Regression analyses illustrate how the panel data allow us to explore how and why people's perceptions of the agreement shift over time. The MAPS data will enable scholars to gain insights into the microfoundations of peacebuilding over time and across space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'local' as a site of peacebuilding and as a subject position has played a significant role in scholarly debates on peacebuilding and international intervention, and increasingly so in work on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Local women are called upon to represent the conflict experience, and localisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda is becoming part of the rhetoric around implementation. This article examines the impacts of this focus with reference to peacebuilding and women's inclusion initiatives in Iraq in locations previously held by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The article analyses three programmatic case studies situated in Ninewa, a governorate in northern Iraq. The analysis offers a four-part typology of local women participants – local women as peacebuilders, a-political (and a-sectarian), non-elite and intermediary – and uses these types to explore how the participation and presence of local women is constructed within peacebuilding programming. By introducing these types, this article makes visible the practical and conceptual impact of the focus on the 'local' on the Women, Peace and Security agenda, its implementation in post-conflict contexts, and on how local women and their contributions are perceived in Women, Peace and Security-focused peacebuilding interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delves into the discursive recontextualization of new public financial management (NPFM) in the context of peacebuilding, reshaping the dynamics among the donor community, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. Utilizing Fairclough's dialectical relational version of Critical Discourse Analysis (2003, 2013) as a methodological framework, we extend the NPFM literature by broadening our understanding of how diverse discourses—particularly NPFM rooted in neoliberalism and peacebuilding—are brought together in a specific relationship for the purpose of transmission. In addition, this study advances our comprehension of the dialogic nature of NPFM, exploring the extent to which other voices are represented, excluded, or suppressed in the examined texts. The paper sheds light on the role of international agencies, exemplified by the World Bank, in transposing development discourses—a theme explored in previous research. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature by highlighting that the peacebuilding context serves as a space for influential actors, such as donor agencies, to exert their influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are composed of a varied array of interstices that are often observed as a network of undeveloped, vacant, or leftover spaces and infrastructures. Such conditions, however, little speak on the multifaceted nature of interstitial spaces as in-between domains that can be morphologically heterogeneous, functionally active, and socially constructed; something that expands on the multiple ontologies of interstitiality beyond being vacant, empty, or inert. While acknowledged around their development potentials or as elements of segregation, the physicality of interstices obscures their evolving spatiality between conflict and divide, relationality, and acceptance. This spatiality becomes plausible in post-conflict cities—such as Belfast—where interstitiality takes the form of “interfaces”: complex in-between areas that articulate divided Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Unionist communities throughout peacebuilding politics. By taking a phenomenological approach, the spatiality and meanings of Belfast interfaces are scrutinised to find that Belfast interfaces speak on multiple ontologies linked to (i) their evolving spatiality, (ii) their constructed meanings, and (iii) their naturalisation as daily-life transitions that draw on emerging forms of safety, identity, memory, integration, segregation and futurity. Belfast interfaces take the ontological turn of the in-betweenness towards suggesting that the staging of spaces as promoting togetherness can be more illusionary than concrete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine three business-related initiatives designed to achieve peace positive impacts in the Cape Town township of Langa. Each was seemingly straightforward in its purpose, logic, and implementation. However, their positive intent was frustrated and their impacts ultimately harmful to their articulated goals. Understanding why this is so can be difficult in violent, turbulent, and information-poor environments such as Langa, confounding progress even by actors with ethical intentions. To aid in sense making and to provide insight for more positive future action, we develop from 125 interviews conducted for this study causal loop models for these initiatives within their conflict subsystems. These explain the perverse impacts of these initiatives by illuminating their (lack of) salience to key conflict factors, their (in)sufficiency to effect positive change in light of competing systems dynamics, and their (in)attentiveness to interdependencies with the intentions and actions of others. We thus contribute to understanding of the factors required to achieve positive social outcomes in more extreme contexts. More generally, we demonstrate the value of systems analysis both for scholarship related to business and peace and for reducing blind spots that can inhibit sound planning for ethical business action amidst complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their long-lasting work in Armenia and Turkey, peacebuilding practitioners of civil society have an ambivalent relationship with the term peace and refrain from defining their role as peacebuilders. Informed by the anthropological research adopting the local turn in peace and conflict studies, we explore how civil society practitioners in Armenia and Turkey perceive the concept of “peace” (խաղաղություն or khaghaghutyun in Armenian and barış in Turkish) and how they position themselves regarding the meanings they attach to this term. In this paper, we present data collected through semi-structured interviews with civil society practitioners from both countries, investigating the perceptions and practices in the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. We found that the flexibility of the term normalization in comparison to peacebuilding is preferred among civil society practitioners working for the Armenia-Turkey dialogue. We also show that the political context shapes local meanings of the word peace. While in Turkey, the authoritarian regime, restrictions on NGOs, and rise of ultranationalism make open advocacy for peace with Armenia difficult and risky, the war with Azerbaijan firmly structures where and how the word peace can be used in Armenia – even though it is not clear what is meant by it in either case. Finally, our research points out a neglected aspect of professionalism in this context and shows how it requires emotional labor to suppress enthusiasm and hope for peace. We close our paper with a call for further research among the youth and exploration of effective communication, alternative approaches, and terminologies that can foster meaningful dialogue and reconciliation without provoking divisive sentiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of grassroots actors in regions of violent conflict where competing governance systems exists. Specifically, it focuses on those living in the borderlands of South America, where alternative forms of governance may be created in response to violence between state and criminal organizations. In this context, how can grassroots actors overcome protracted armed violence and establish new, legitimate forms of social governance? To explore this question, our methodology employs data triangulation, combining literature, news reports, and fieldwork data collected in two violence‐prone territories: the borderlands of Cúcuta (Colombia)/Táchira state (Venezuela) and Pedro Juan Caballero (Paraguay)/Ponta Porã (Brazil). We argue that grassroots actors can develop innovative and alternative governance structures that differ from those of the state and criminal groups. This research also contributes to the ongoing discussion about the agency of local actors in violent conflicts between nonstate actors and the state. The findings demonstrate that grassroots actors in violent border regions can actively transform conflicts and build peace, particularly in areas such as migration, security, health, and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS), formalizing an agenda for positive youth participation in peace and security. However, youth peace activists have been leading peacebuilding long before this institutional recognition. This article explores the dynamics of how advocates and institutional actors conceptualize and negotiate compromise. To do this, it draws on in-depth interviews with youth and adult YPS advocates, a critical analysis of documents related to the agenda, and extended participant observation. It explores and develops a notion of a field of youth-oriented peacebuilding, drawing on Bourdieu. This makes visible a more complex field of struggle, showing how compromise can help explain how youth actively negotiate their participation in formalized agendas and persist in their own peacebuilding ambitions. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of compromise to understand the affordances and limitations of youth agency and institutional agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As conflict dynamics become complex and escalate globally, especially identity-based conflicts, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift in the Conflict Analysis and Resolution and Peacebuilding field toward contextually innovative and effective community-led approaches. The inadequacies of liberal and neoliberal paradigms and the increase in identity-based conflicts, religious pluralism, and differences in communities have motivated evidence-based inter-religious community-level engagements over the past two decades. These interventions rely on the theoretical frameworks of emancipatory peacebuilding and compassionate reasoning, and reflect an in-depth sense of spirituality, longing, and the essence of human relationship building and practice. This study gathers data from primary sources (which include findings from hybrid interviews) through a semi-participatory and empirical qualitative explorative research process in order to critique the underlying philosophies of traditional paradigms and explore emerging alternatives. It also posits that inter-religious community-led interventions are founded on the emancipatory elicitive religious peacebuilding (EERPb) framework. They are adaptive to non-linear (and sometimes non-scientific) approaches and are less focused on international standards. The framework fundamentally embraces phenomenological, metaphysical, and ethical realities in peacebuilding, operationalizes the concept of just peace, and acknowledges a global approach to peace that offers the opportunity to resolve the difficulties encountered by the various CAR and peacebuilding theoretical schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of micro-dynamics has grown over the last two decades, emerging now as a mainstay in research on peace and conflict. The focus on micro-dynamics, and other micro-level approaches, challenges the primacy of state-centric research. Yet despite the growing literature around the micro-dynamics of conflict and peacebuilding, the term remains opaque. Its use has evolved beyond a sweeping indicator for 'subnational', yet the field of study has seen limited development of the definitional parameters of the term and why the term retains utility. In this article we explore the deployment of the concept in distinct literatures, provide a working definition, and assess its application to the study of peace and conflict. We argue that micro-dynamics are simultaneously a unit of analysis, a social phenomenon and a sense-making tool for understanding human relations in the broader societal ecosystem. We contend that a micro-dynamics approach contributes to peace and conflict studies, offering insight into how individuals get on with their lives in conflict-affected areas. By providing multilayered insights of complex scenarios based upon thick, empirically led inductive analysis, the micro-dynamics lens generates a granular understanding of (i) how individuals and groups live and perceive boundaries and (ii) the shifting and malleable nature of inter- and intragroup relations in conflict-affected societies. A micro-dynamics lens, moreover, evidences (iii) the interconnected nature of the micro- and other scalar levels of analysis, elucidating understanding of what we characterize as the peace and conflict ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Necropolitics, as described by Achille Mbembe, is the sovereign's capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. In its delineation of which bodies can be killed and which bodies must not be killed, necropolitics is the framework through which governments assign value to human life that justifies killing in the name of the greater good. Proposed legislation in the UK Parliament from 2021 suggested the state intended to limit prosecutions of British service personnel for killings that occurred during Operation Banner, the UK military operation in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2007. Interrogating the employment of military amnesty, we discuss the ways amnesty can maintain necropolitical organizations by working to reaffirm antagonistic relations between peacebuilding parties despite claims that it is a reconciliatory measure. Through a necropolitical lens, we examine historical approaches to military prosecutions by the UK alongside current proposals for amnesty over conflict-related homicides committed in Northern Ireland. Interrogating peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts made in the UK to address the conflict in Northern Ireland, we assert that the calls for amnesty remain under the same necropolitical organization that facilitated the Troubles to begin with and maintain narratives that Other Northern Ireland from Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peace is often represented as a matter of time, as a political state that happens after war. This special issue contests this linear and binary view by giving an account of being and thinking between the boundaries of peace and war. It challenges mainstream ideas, political discourses, and collective imaginaries about the location of violence, peace, and peacebuilding. It does so by providing empirical and theoretical arguments as to why Peace and Conflict Studies and Geographies of Peace should widen their scope of empirical sites to include contexts of non-war violence, such as military urbanism, counterterrorism, police violence, migration, environmental struggles, and continued everyday violence and peacebuilding in different locations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. To do so, the special issue presents four theoretical lines of inquiry: 1) spatiality; 2) temporality; 3) feminist phenomenology and; 4) decolonial thought. Collectively, the articles make a strong case, epistemologically, theoretically, and methodologically, about peace as a complex embodied experience that should be analysed in time and space. The special issue concludes by calling for 'making space for peace' through in-betweenness, care, and non-violent resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on feminist and decolonial perspectives and engages with political geography literature to rethink the way that peace and violence are understood in the Global South. Building peace that is coherent with planetary and ecological limits and that does not further direct structural violence necessitates breaking with the extractivist model of development that benefits growth and accumulation over the well-being of humans and more than human lives. By theorising the way that degrowth strategies can be understood as furthering climate resilient peace in the Global South, this article proposes two ways that we can understand peace as a liberatory praxis based on the 'room to grow' and 'the right to say no'. Through these two strategies, I aim at centring a liberatory praxis for peace on the need to negate both material and symbolic systems and structures of oppression that produce climate and environmental changes, as well as reproduce direct, structural and cultural violence. A peace praxis focused on the liberation of the Global South identifies that different types of violence linked to climate and environmental changes and underdevelopment are not only connected but that they share their roots in deeper structural systems of extractivism, exploitation and colonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on peace has been filled with notions of peacebuilding in crisis or creating more problems than it solves. However, as peacebuilding is critiqued for not fulfilling its promises, the nuances of peace and violence present in peacebuilding practices are often left ignored. Arguing that peace is a continuum of peace and violence seen by understanding peace as embodied, spatial, and political, the article analyses peacebuilding practices creating a conflictual Lebanese peace. The article looks closer at three such practices: service provision, local interactions, and Lebanese local governance. Through empirical material, the article illustrates how service provision, local interactions and local governance are performed through power relations sustaining a continuum of peace and violence. As such, the article argues that rather than a continuum between peace and violence, Lebanese peacebuilding is a simultaneous process of peace and violence. This questions the assumed opposition between violence and peace and claims that by emphasising peace as embodied, situated, and political we can discern different peace(s) more peaceful for some than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The term encounter has been used in various disciplines to indicate a bringing together of difference (people, groups, ideas, etc.) with an aim of some form of positive or beneficial outcome' [Standish, K., 2021. Encounter Theory. Peacebuilding, 9 (1), 1–14.]. Allport [Allport, G.W., 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books] suggests that contact between different groups might lead to a positive change and the reduction in stereotypes, but later research shows that often conflict is more likely to arise. Nonetheless, while contact might presuppose co-existence and thereby, the enduring presence of conflict, encounter 'is much more than that and involves a space where being with is the outcome itself' (Standish 2021: 40). It is my contention that the ambivalent nature of the encounters that occur in the Calaisian space generates a layered level of dislocation for those who are entering this space. By definition 'ambivalent' implies that feelings and reactions are mixed or contradictory. It argues that the ambivalence of these encounters shape not only people of the move's experiences but also the discourses around them, leading to constant tensions and shifting allegiances, and ultimately the maintenance of the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries are in a state of post-conflict, a situation where an armed conflict between countries or within a country has just come to an end. Such countries are typically poor and characterized by political instability, economic problems and social unrest. Entrepreneurship is considered crucial for such countries as a driver of economic recovery and peacebuilding. However, the exact role and effect of entrepreneurship in a post-conflict context is not well understood and an integrative perspective is needed. Our study reviews the fragmented knowledge on entrepreneurship in post-conflict countries. We structure the literature into four distinct categories (when and where, who and why, how, and impact) and develop an integrative conceptual model. Our review reveals research gaps and suggests directions for future research on entrepreneurship in post-conflict countries. Our study also helps policy-makers to design an effective entrepreneurship policy considering the specific requirements of post-conflict contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical Islamic insurgency and violent extremism have claimed over 5,250 lives and forcibly displaced at least 734,000 people in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique over the past six and a half years. Counter-insurgency efforts of the government to date have mainly focused on a military- and security-based response, paying less attention to the structural drivers of extremist violence, such as socio-economic inequalities, poor gov-ernance, historic ideological, ethnic and religious oppositions, and an incomplete peace-building and reconciliation process from the post-civil war period. The paper examines how Mozambique can learn from its past peace-building and Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) experience, build on the achievements while also correct the shortcomings, which have equally contributed to the rise of violence. It also analyses ways to implement a tailored, inclusive, and effective strategy of Countering and Pre-venting Violent Extremism (C/PVE), building on the past but linking it to present needs and future challenges. Addressing long-standing root causes, focusing on youth and their communities, and furthering reconciliation are just a few areas, among others, to focus on to ensure that a heavy military response does not undermine the prospects of long-term peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than ever, the capacity to engage in discourse addressing challenges we face as a nation is necessary. Young people must be able to navigate complex relationships in a diverse society. Yet, student capacity for constructive engagement across difference in classrooms is limited, and teachers lack the capacity to support students in dialogic communication, openness to difference, or other key peace education skills. This study thus reports on Civic Conversations, a professional development program for teachers modeling dialogic teaching in classroom contexts. Drawing upon data from multiple cohorts, the study shows that this program helps teachers develop a dialogic stance: belief in the value of dialogue as a foundational approach to teaching. Data suggests that the dialogic structure of the professional development program played an especially important role in facilitating teacher development of this belief and in enabling teachers to understand how dialogue allows them to build stronger classroom community while stepping back from being the center of focus in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts arising from identity differences often resist resolution, and leave lasting consequences for generations. These conflicts often result from groups' perception of identity threats. This study examines the impact of identity threat on social group relations through a case study of Jews during their history of exile and the construction of the State of Israel. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of social identity, intergroup relations, and identity threat, this paper explores the historical experience of Jews, highlighting the preservation of Jewish identity and the emergence of perceptions of identity threats in intergroup relations between Jews and other communities. This study emphasizes the importance of addressing identity-based fears for sustainable peace-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little evidence exists on the design and implementation of anticipatory action (AA) in complex crises. This article examines a 2022 United Nations ‘early action’ pilot in South Sudan in advance of extreme flooding. As a case study of efforts to act in a complex crisis, it contributes to learning on assisting conflict‐affected and displaced populations in advance of extreme weather events. The research points towards the possibility and value of implementing forecast‐informed early action in complex contexts with limited forecast skills and multiple hazards when trigger‐based AA is not possible. It also argues for the need to link AA implemented in complex crises to development and peacebuilding actors and processes. More broadly, examining the perceptions and processes of AA in the form of early action, rather than a formal AA framework, is highly relevant for the AA community as attention is increasingly placed on providing AA in countries affected by fragility and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article looks into why, to date, discourses of peace in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict context failed to present a challenge to the hegemony of ethnonationalism. With the liberal world order in crisis and Armenian and Azerbaijani identities entering a period of redefinition following the latter's overwhelming military victory and exodus of the Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh, the article argues for a sustained effort towards rethinking peace and ongoing dialogue among realist, liberal, and post-liberal thinkers a road towards a multifaceted and interdisciplinary process that could move the South Caucasus away from violence and towards peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the short film "Best Man Corner" directed by Jaremey McMullin, which explores the lives of motorcycle taxi drivers in Monrovia, Liberia. These drivers, many of whom are former child soldiers, rely on hustling as a means of survival and peacebuilding in the aftermath of the country's civil war. The film gives voice to these young men, allowing them to share their stories and challenges. It also highlights the negative stereotypes and prejudices they face, particularly as young men in post-war societies. The film offers a unique perspective on the complexities of post-conflict life and the agency of young people in shaping their own futures. [Extracted from the article]

This article develops a post-digital perspective for the study of international peacebuilding and elaborates its merits. Contrary to narratives in policy and practice that tend to fetishize the digital, digital peacebuilding cannot be meaningfully separated from peacebuilding before digitalization. Resisting the call for a "digital turn," a post-digital lens helps to research, rewrite, and rework the digital while simultaneously staying with and moving beyond digitalization. It aims to demystify the role of digital technologies while enabling critical scrutiny of their impact on contemporary and future peacebuilding. More specifically, the post-digital helps us to (1) establish a critical distance to narratives of fast-paced innovation and progress that fetishize the digital, (2) scrutinize how digitalization compounds contemporary approaches and constellations of peacebuilding, (3) engage with the uneven temporalities of digital peacebuilding and its diverse global manifestations, (4) shed light on its real, embodied, and tangible effects on conflict-affected populations, (5) hold digitalization accountable by unearthing disillusionments and failures, (6) re-adjust our focus on human agency in the development and use of the socio-technical systems that constitute digital peacebuilding, (7) and finally, take a rhizomatic view that is concerned with how power relations make and break digitalized peacebuilding networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I make a case for studying the outcome of security cooperation between external and host forces through the lens of their relationship. This is because in order for such military cooperation to have a sustainable effect, the host needs to develop ownership and autonomy over its own security responses. This article sets out from the observation that there is an evident discrepancy between the stated intent and the actual outcome of the cooperation between the G5 Sahel Joint Force (G5S-JF) and external actors. Building on insights from peace-building and security force assistance (SFA) literature, I argue that the relationship between the G5S-JF and external actors is best characterised as one of asymmetric interdependence and that this asymmetric interdependence can explain why the G5S-JF never developed into an autonomous force with ownership over its security responses. The concept of asymmetric interdependence provides a new lens through which to research SFA and can potentially shed light on other relationships between international, regional, national and local actors more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although United Nations peace missions have played an important conflict management role for decades, a backlash against the post-Cold War model of 'liberal peacebuilding' and other recent developments have called their future into doubt. Some observers contend that a 'pragmatic turn' is now underway—a shift away from ambitious plans to transform war-torn societies into liberal democracies and towards more modest and realistic goals. Whether 'pragmatism' offers a viable alternative framework for peacebuilding, however, is less clear. This article challenges key assumptions of the pragmatic approach to peacebuilding, including the notion that UN missions can be 'agnostic' about the governance arrangements of societies that host these operations, as some proponents of pragmatism recommend. Historical case-studies show that such assumptions are integral features of collective conflict management systems, including UN peace missions. Moreover, a close examination of the pragmatist approach reveals that it, too, is based on such assumptions—namely, that building peace requires the promotion of pluralist societies and states. Pluralist peacebuilding, the article concludes, could offer a compelling foundation for future UN missions in an era of rising statist–authoritarianism, but developing this approach will first require discarding pragmatism's pretence of ideological agnosticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study draws from the extensive academic literature on leadership as a phenomenon and a topic of study, the leadership and peace nexus, and business leadership theories such as resistance leadership, system leadership, and wise and ethical leadership. It examines actual leadership through in-depth interviews of three Japanese business leaders under three themes: how they understand the existing system, connect or envision connecting people, and care for human dignity. The study finds that the leaders appraise the existing system from a broad perspective, attempt to use business to change it, and connect people transnationally. In this process, they illustrate care for the dignity of the people involved. Their vision of transforming their businesses into transnational communities across stakeholders and to change the world for the better can be a model for peacebuilding through business. We also posit that the flexibility and speediness of business leaders' decision-making and actions are advantageous for peace leadership and that businesses have the potential to engage in peacebuilding sustainably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, the use of indicators to track implementation of international peacebuilding and peacekeeping programmes, policies and practices has proliferated. Indicators are criticised by many scholars for their technocratic, standardised and colonialising effects. This article follows a different line of inquiry. Can indicators be transformative? Contemporary critiques place indicators as bureaucratic artefacts in a vacuum, detached and decontextualised from the nuances of human agency developing, utilising and subverting them. I conceptualise indicators as powerful gendered technologies of knowledge creation developed, used and subverted by institutional actors. Using interviews with institutional actors and United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Reports, I trace institutional stories of one indicator (out of 26) developed to capture implementation of the UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The indicator investigated tracks the number of senior gender experts employed within UN Peacekeeping and Special Political Missions. Stories of progress, skill, and location in the reporting of this indicator between 2010 and 2020 highlight strategies deployed and opportunities taken by feminist-change advocates within the UN to prompt a deeper implementation of the WPS agenda. While indicators hold the danger of reinforcing neoliberal norms, the failure to conceptualise the potential for developing, utilising and/or subverting the indicators smacks of hubris, limiting opportunities for meaningful transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the tension often experienced in "Arts for Peace" programmes between the desire meaningfully to evaluate a creative process and the need to account to funders for the delivery of pre-determined expected outcomes that makes no allowance for discoveries made as the project unfolds. Taking the EU-funded Theatre and Peace-building Academy programme (2018–2020) as its case-study, it reflects on the efficacy of the arts to engage with a wide range of people at a deep level, helping them to challenge their assumptions and presuppositions and to begin to see things in new ways and from opposing perspectives. In particular, it invites a re-examination of some of the assumptions that typically frame peacebuilding activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decades following the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement saw an expansion of support for cultural activities aimed at fostering reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Yet in spite of an increase in funder-led processes of audit and evaluation, there exists a significant absence of accessible data recording the development, production and experience of such cultural and artistic practices. Using the concept of the archive as a site of memory and forgetfulness, this article explores how funders of Art for Reconciliation (AfR), and the power implicit in their relationships with funded practitioners, influence what traces of this work are officially archived and in what form. The selectivity of this archive reflects a managerialism associated with the liberal peace ideology that decontextualises and depoliticises peacebuilding. In order to develop effective AfR practices, we explore ways to recollect and disseminate those aspects of AfR practice that existing methods of documentation have tended to forget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The undertaking of a long-term study of art for reconciliation (AfR) throws up problematics in terms of instrumentalist evaluation, short-term funding, a lack of archiving and insufficient long-term view/memory of the activity. In researching twenty years of funding and practice we argue that the concepts of reconciliation lack conceptual coherence in approach within an environment that resonates with tensions and conflict. One reason for these tensions is the under-appreciation of the role of the aesthetic given funders rarely develop a proper understanding of arts social peacebuilding roles. The article not only promotes the concepts of AfR and the multi-methodological approaches required to study long-term aspects and outcomes but also highlights the potential of research that brings funders, those funded, artists and participants together to map out more cohered AfR approaches. Reconciliation requires time to develop and embed and within that understanding, its potential to achieve will remain underdeveloped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the youth participate in electoral processes in contemporary Zimbabwe and the concomitant implications for peacebuilding. It is based on the case study of Harare covering the post-2008 period and data drawn from both primary and secondary sources. Employing the postmaterialist theory, the article argues that though destructive tendencies remained, Zimbabwean youth have mainly participated in electoral processes in beneficial ways with far-reaching implications for peace post-2008. The study found that the youth participated in electoral processes through campaigning for peaceful elections, voting, electioneering for their political parties and contesting as candidates. It asserts that youth participation in electoral processes in Zimbabwe scored some successes such as an improvement in the number of youth voters and having youth candidates resulting in some becoming legislators. The youth also faced several challenges hindering them from fruitfully participating in electoral processes. This included marginalisation, lack of resources, and a restrictive and harsh political environment. The article concludes that the youth have the potential to peacefully and significantly participate in electoral processes provided they are able to overcome the challenges they are currently facing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts on the African continent present a paradox: the number of conflicts and casualties are increasing while at the same time becoming more peripheral and less threatening to governments. This article argues that the rise of a new kind of conflict helps explain this trend: violent political orders in which warfare is used by governments as a means of doling out patronage and managing dissent rather than defeating opponents on the battlefield. This logic of governance emerges as regimes weaken their own military as a form of coup-proofing; and due to the rampant fragmentation and marginalisation of insurgent groups, which lack the ability to topple governments. After detailed broad conflict trends on the continent, the article uses conflicts in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as examples of this logic, with Mali offered as a partial, theory-building exception. Grappling with this reality will require peacemakers to shift focus from the short-term imperatives of reaching peace deals to the broader challenge of reforming the logic of governance at the heart of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of International Relations as a field of study in part responded to the experience of World War One. Its consolidation and differentiation after World War Two went hand in hand with the entanglement of the incipient discipline with the Cold War. Peace research emerged as a reaction to this development. It established itself as critical research insofar as it was concerned with clarifying the connection between (if not unity of) the East-West and North-South conflicts on the one hand, the deformation of international communication under the conditions of nuclear deterrence and global ideological confrontation on the other. In this context, theory building focused on the concept of peace as a challenge to the dominant understanding of global conflict (for instance as an object of strategic studies). Towards the end of the Cold War, the focus shifted to the interaction between democracy and peace and the possibility of conceptualizing peace as a civilizational process. Debates on peace theory, for some years, were also subsumed under a rapidly blossoming interest in an 'expanded concept of security' in the social sciences. At the same time, the practical promotion of peace (peacebuilding) came to the fore, while theory building on the democratic peace was increasingly confronted with (interventionist) wars by democracies. As a result, the focus of theory building in IR shifted again, now in favor of examining the development of global orders and the significance of norms in this context. This also involved a debate on the limits of 'peace through law' (i.e. the constitutionalization of international law), the justification of force as part of normative ordering in world politics and issues of peace ethics. Can we nevertheless speak of a fading of peace-theoretical interests in IR - even in the face of the escalation of the threat of war? If so, do the ideas presented in this ZIB-Forum present some points of departure for reviving interest in peace theory as part of IR? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (ZIB) is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (ZIB) is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The UN-orchestrated Triple Nexus – a multilateral endeavour to provide humanitarian-development-peace responses in fragile and conflict-affected contexts – embodies several features of the emerging trend towards governance through regime complexity. Praised for its multi-actorness inclusivity and cross-policy experimentalism, the Nexus approach has been criticised as an attempt to replicate top-down, neo-liberal templates to govern crises in the peripheries. We analyse the new evidence provided in this Special Issue, connecting it to the debate on the future of multilateral governance, against the decline of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Guarding against naïve expectations of the Nexus as a panacea to bridge cross-policy gaps and bring about inter-agency cooperation amidst increased geopolitical tensions, we discuss its potential to become a venue for an enlarged conversation among traditional and new players. While also compatible with pluralist scenarios, a progressive variety of the Nexus may well emerge in the UN context, between Western and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) players. Their shared understandings of civil and political rights offer a promising avenue to advance some forward-looking Nexus components, supportive of individual and nature-based rights, to govern the increased complexity of the current multiplex order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of rising contestations to the Liberal International Order (LIO), it is crucial to highlight the contribution of the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region to international institutions and global governance, particularly considering its peripheral position in the world order. The Triple Nexus Approach (TPA), adopted in 2016, promotes a coordinated effort in providing humanitarian assistance and aid for development by integrating them with peace endeavours. The LAC region has provided political and conceptual contributions to each TPA component, providing alternative perspectives on multilateral governance in humanitarian action, development and peacebuilding, emphasising the pursuit of collective and context-specific outcomes for crisis prevention. Focusing on the period from the early 21st century to 2019, a time when the Triple Nexus theoretical structuring publications emerged, it is highlighted how contestations to the LIO and the changing world order have impacted global governance norms, creating opportunities for emerging and peripheral countries to shape post-liberal rules. This allows Global South countries to set self-determined development objectives and make a meaningful contribution to global rule-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although new policy frameworks such as the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus are emerging to better respond to increasingly complex and protracted conflicts and humanitarian crises, analysis of their impact remains limited. We analyse the case of Iraq in the aftermath of the ISIL conflict with data that measures the impact of interventions from across the nexus domains. Results show that humanitarian and development outcomes improved steadily over time, while peace outcomes remained poor and relatively unchanged. Improvement in the 'soft' security elements of peace related to social cohesion and coexistence were superseded by a deterioration in 'hard' security elements linked to protection of civilians and security configurations over time. These findings are explained by the lack of integration of hard security elements into an otherwise comprehensive international response along HDP Triple Nexus components. Separate hard security interventions rather had a critically different scope focused primarily on counterterrorism without further encompassing the wider range of security issues facing conflict-affected populations, including those internally displaced seeking to return, nor did they consider the diffusion of local powers and actors in this regard. This has left particularly vulnerable displaced and conflict-affected communities without remedy as priorities in the country shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an empirical comparison of peace processes in carbon-dependent economies over time, this article investigates the impact of decarbonization and the related declining availability of political finance on peacemaking. While the period of high oil prices in the mid-2000s saw a small number of peace deals that attempted comprehensive settlements, the decline of oil prices in the years from 2014 resulted in a new era of turbulence. The turbulence is characterized by a high number of peacemaking attempts that strongly lean toward conflict management rather than resolution. The reasons for this new turbulence are twofold: the available means for substantial "buy-in," into a political marketplace by ruling elites in carbon-dependent conflictive political marketplaces have vanished while, at the same time, the strategic interest of international powers in geopolitical stability and their willingness and capability to invest in such stability has declined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines narratives and practices of post-conflict recovery in Bougainville and Solomon Islands respectively, with particular emphasis on the governance of justice and security. The original visions and pathways to recovery differed markedly in each case. Drawing on local strengths, including traditional leadership and customary practices of reconciliation, was integral to Bougainville's aspirations for peacebuilding and the shaping of its post-conflict social and political order. Under the auspices of a major Australian-led regional intervention, Solomon Islands followed a more conventional state building approach that made few concessions to the significance of local non-state social institutions and actors in relation to justice and security. Despite these initial divergences, recent years have seen growing areas of convergence in both places, notably around acknowledging the importance of practical hybridity between state and non-state forms of justice and security governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peacebuilding and transitional justice are the intervention processes that are very important in war-torn societies in the post-conflict period, and their relations with each other are worthy of attention. There has always been the challenge of revenge and forgiveness, that is, criminal justice on the one hand and national reconciliation on the other. Regarding the interaction between Peacebuilding and transitional justice, distinct, conflicting, and even contradictory opinions have been raised. The following lines are intended to comment on the interaction of Peacebuilding and transitional justice in the post-conflict period. Therefore, it is shown that these two are related to each other and work parallel in conflict situations. According to the topic under discussion, the current research is descriptive-analytical and it was done through the library method. The following article has shown that the peace and justice that takes place with the intervention and entry of peacekeepers and foreign forces (so-called top-down peace and justice) is different from the local peace and justice without the entry and intervention of outsiders. (so-called peace and justice from the bottom up) and they do not always have the same results. Therefore, transitional justice and Peacebuilding are not only in conflict with each other. However, the results of the study of the relationship between transitional justice and Peacebuilding indicate that these two processes due to only dealing with past violence, have caused socio-economic justice or normal and social daily behaviors to be marginalized.

This white paper takes the unknown and the vague and movement towards/in those realms – as frames for a discussion of present practice and emergent potentiality of anthropological engagement with peace (building) studies. Arguably, embracing the unknown or vague as generative constants as well as fundamental elements of non-linear peacebuilding further open collaborative, communicative spaces of possibility. Aspects of this discussion are drawn from broader conceptual/methodological considerations in both peacebuilding and social anthropology so as to contribute to an interdisciplinary alignment. Furthermore, the positions and persuasions in this work are (in)formed by extensive, on-going examinations of research and narratives active in Southeast Europe today. By looking to emergent concepts in peace studies via anthropology while moving with regional-specific ethnographies that speak back against North Atlantic hegemonies, there is offered a discussion that brings local realities into transnational (socio-academic) deliberations.