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This article interrogates how survivors/victims participate in peacemaking and victim-centred Transitional Justice initiatives, focusing on the role of the victims' delegations during the Santos-FARC/EP peace talks in Colombia (2012-2016). The article presents unique empirical data, drawing on sixty-eight interviews with participants from the talks. The research assesses Colombia's victim-centred approach, arguing that the delegations shaped the content of the peace agreement, influenced historic narratives of victimhood and shaped victim-perpetrator relationships, facilitating victim agency and empowerment. However, wider political and economic prerogatives and dominant TJ tendencies constrained the broader exercise of agency, whilst participants experienced episodes of disempowerment and instrumentalisation.

The architects of the Oslo process, at both the academic and intelligence levels, used the faulty ‘New Middle East’ paradigm to posit that the Palestinians were ripe for peacemaking. They ignored t...

This article seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion on values in co-design processes, by introducing concepts from the emerging field of valuation studies. Using the work of David Stark and Ignacio Farias as an entry point to this perspective, it shows how co-design can be understood as a collective process of finding negotiated settlements among conflicting accounts of value, through practices of coordination. This idea is illustrated by a case in which co-design is mobilised as a tool for developing and governing ‘active frontages’ in a regenerating district in Gothenburg, Sweden. The article shows how the valuation studies perspective relates to, and in part differs from, other approaches to collaborative and participatory design. While sharing some of the intuitions of both agonism- and actor-network theory-informed approaches, its front-staging of practices and principles of valuation does nevertheless provide an alternative perspective on co-design. The valuation approach depicts co-design processes as a negotiation-based search for settlements, which suspends rather than solves value conflicts. Thus, co-design may be construed as a form of diplomacy, which operates within certain political limits of designerly peacemaking.

Debates on hybrid peace largely concentrate on ‘local-international’ interactions compared to domestic hybrid orders. Besides, the literature on Ghana dichotomises state and non-state peacemaking, ...

Although poetry has been used as a method of peacemaking since Homer’s Iliad, little research, theory, or analysis has been done evaluating precisely what role poetry holds in the realms of peacema...

The United Nations (UN) has developed a complex and interconnected system of committees, representatives, and missions in support of its peace and security mandate. This article introduces the Unit...

The use of referendums to forge, ratify and enact peace agreements is on the rise. In growing numbers, peacemakers have organized referendums in order to aid peace talks and ameliorate post-settlem...

John Young’s recent book is a remarkable illustration of the difficulties of writing balanced yet topical works of contemporary history. It is a difficulty, which is particularly salient when one d...

This paper investigates anti-terrorism law’s impact on peace-making efforts of the nonviolent allies of Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA) and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Drawing on...

This article discusses a few epistemological conditions that may have prevented ‘peacemaking monitoring specialists’ to conceive the possibility of a negative result at the October 2016 Colombian p...

The 1956 Suez conflict was not inevitable. The involvement of an impartial third party had offered an exit ramp for the main protagonists. Largely forgotten today, India strove to reconcile the int...

My only concern is that the museum will be a passive thing: I would like it to be [a] stimulant for Action, not something that people come and look at to pass time on a wet afternoon…—David R. Wool...

Secessionist conflicts present challenges for peacemaking. Separatists’ and states’ irreconcilable demands frequently prevent negotiated settlement. One peacemaking model for territorial conflict is temporary autonomy followed by a referendum on independence. Both sides have an opportunity to persuade voters of their positions while de-escalating conflict prior to a polarizing vote. This article examines the application of this model in two cases: the French territory of New Caledonia and the Papua New Guinean province of Bougainville, and argues that the model succeeds in temporary stabilization but may fail to alter the irreconcilable territorial claims of states and breakaway regions, risking conflict relapse.

This article investigates the implications of women’s exclusion for the nature and durability of peace processes, and whether factors that undermine peace consolidation post-settlement might be prevented through more inclusive peacemaking. It examines the Sudan-South Sudan peace process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the roles women played in peacemaking and their exclusion from official negotiations, and the sources of insecurity post-CPA. South Sudan’s peace process shows that the exclusion of women can be understood as a canary in a coal mine: a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes. Women’s exclusion was the product of the region’s political marketplace, in which power and authority is secured by elites through violence and bargaining, to the exclusion of other groups. By understanding exclusion as a deliberate strategic tactic that extends from war into peacetime, I argue ...

This article argues for reconceptualizing islām as ‘wholeness making, peacemaking, well-being making, and safety making’ in the institutional setting of theological schools. A small number of Prote...

Field offices are an increasingly important reality in the architecture of African peacemaking. Yet despite their importance in practice, in academic debates on peacebuilding and mediation, little ...

Despite an increasing academic interest, ECOWAS peacemaking interventions have largely been approached from a top-down perspective. This tends to highlight the roles played by high-level mediators ...

South African scholar and peace activist John de Gruchy sees a close relationship between sacraments and peacemaking processes. Even though a Protestant, he calls the Church a sacramental community and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a ‘civic sacrament’. This raises the question of the relationship between processes and rituals of peacemaking and sacramentality. Moreover, how does reconciliation, as a core doctrine of Christian theology, relate to sacramentality and peacemaking efforts in society? Is reconciliation sacramental? Hans Boersma’s sacramental ontology provides a theological basis for an affirmative answer. Furthermore, the notion of Christ (and the Church) as primal sacrament(s) (Semmelroth, Schillebeeckx) gives a further basis to see processes of peacemaking as sacramental. The article argues for a sacramental spirituality of reconciliation (Schreiter). However, applying the arguments to two concrete cases, the TRC and the twinning of Coventry and Dresden, shows some dif...

This study contributes to the history of forgiveness. It samples twenty-nine Latin model sermons on the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18. 23–35) to access instructions and per...

Intended for students of conflict management as well as both diplomatic and non-governmental practitioners, International Negotiation and Mediation in Violent Conflicts makes an ambitious attempt t...

Pedagogy, Politics and Philosophy is a rich, somewhat eclectic mixture of chapters exploring the concept of peace in both practice and theory, with chapters focusing on philosophical reflections on...

Previous research on ceasefires in armed conflicts has primarily focused on the aggregated country-level of analysis. By contrast, this article contributes by examining the local-level dynamics of ...

In the Mormon doctrine of posthumous baptism, people can be invited into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) community through baptism even after their death. When it was reported...

This article addresses a major gap in the literature on international mediation by investigating the significance of the mediation mandate. It identifies different types of mediation mandate and examines their functions and effects. A mandate issued by a multilateral organization serves as instructions to the mediator and sets the parameters of the process and outcome of peacemaking. It can therefore have a crucial impact on the orientation, trajectory, and results of mediation. It can contribute to success by conferring legitimacy on the mediation and endowing the mediator with authority, status, and leverage. It can also impair the effectiveness of mediation by provoking tension between the mediating body and other multilateral organizations, the mediator, and the conflict parties.

The African Union (AU) norm relating to unconstitutional changes of government (UCG) distinguishes the African peace and security order from other regional and global peace and security orders. This norm assigns the regional organization an intrusive role unparalleled by other international organizations as far as the constitutional and democratic order of member states is concerned. The norm bans UCG and also provides for enforcement measures that received regional constitutional status in the founding treaty establishing the AU. Despite its emergence accompanying the democratization process that countries on the continent ventured into in the 1990s, seen in the light of Africa’s unhappy experience with illegal change or seizure of government, this norm cannot be dissociated from the continent’s concern about peace and security. Indeed, the norm’s defence of constitutional and democratic rule from unconstitutional changes has evolved and been utilized to operate as a means of promoting or securin...

Does individual-level exposure to political violence prompt conciliatory attitudes? Does the answer vary by phase of conflict? The study uses longitudinal primary datasets to test the hypothesis that conflict-related experiences impact conciliation. Data were collected from Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Across both contexts, and among both parties to each conflict, psychological distress and threat perceptions had a polarizing effect on conciliatory preferences. The study highlights that experiences of political violence are potentially a crucial source of psychological distress, and consequently, a continuing barrier to peace. This has implications in peacemaking, implying that alongside removing the real threat of violence, peacemakers must also work toward the social and political inclusion of those most affected by previous violence.

This introductory article describes peace-making, peace-building and peace-keeping according to the specific characterization of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It presents the different articles in this special issue according to these categories and discusses critically their main theses. This methodology intends to help us gain a better understanding of the challenge of change.

This paper explores the early formation of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and its recent efforts to recreate itself. Originally envisioned as a network of local BPF chapters undertaking peacemaking and ecological projects at the regional level, it has become a web-based network of like-minded individuals connecting online. The founders published a mimeographed newsletter with inspirational translations of historical teachers and information regarding peacemaking efforts and descriptions of Asian Buddhists suffering from violence to discrimination. While the basic mission remains unchanged, current leadership faces a very different landscape, socially, politically and technologically. Current events coverage now routinely includes stories related to violence committed by Buddhists. Reaching out to a younger, less historically minded generation of Buddhists, the organisers seek to revitalise the movement with an online pedagogy called ‘The System Stinks’, inspired by an iconographic image of Robert A...

Most works about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 not surprisingly focus on the leaders of the powers that dominated the peacemaking – Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson. ...

In the dusty streets of Cesar and La Guajira in Colombia, it is unlikely that many of the inhabitants would believe that peacemaking was a role that can be assigned to the extractive industries. Th...

Cultural approaches to reconciliation, those based on ‘traditional’ practices for peacemaking, have attracted the attention of scholars looking at post-conflict regions in Indonesia. Numerous observers have pointed to the revitalisation of the Tobelo adat notion of hibualamo in the province of North Maluku as a successful example of this approach. This paper disputes those conclusions and explores local strategies for peacebuilding and reactions to these strategies in post-conflict North Halmahera. I compare grassroots understandings of ‘reconciliation’ with those of the local elite behind this revitalisation effort. I also debate the concept of reconciliation as it has been applied to the region. Applying the concept of reconciliation, with its connotations of a positive peace, to the post-conflict situation in North Maluku is more of an idealistic view of the potentialities for peace than an actual reflection of reality. I suggest it is more appropriate to describe the situation as one of coexistence or...

The concept of environmental peacebuilding is becoming increasingly prominent among peacebuilding scholars and practitioners. This study provides a brief overview about the various discussions contributing to our understanding of environmental peacebuilding and concludes that questions of space have hardly been explicitly considered in these debates. Drawing on discourse-analytic spatial theory, I discuss how the social construction of scale, place and boundaries are relevant for environmental peacebuilding processes and outcomes. This theoretical approach is then applied to the Good Water Neighbours project, which aims at improving the regional water situation and at building peace between Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians. The results suggest that discursive constructions of space are important in facilitating, impeding or shaping environmental peacebuilding practices. Analyses of environmental peacebuilding, but also of peacebuilding more general, are therefore encouraged to draw more stron...

Kay Pranis is a restorative justice advocate specialising in peacemaking circles. She began her work in criminal justice as the director of research services at the Citizen’s Council on Crime and J...

Water-management issues cut across all sectors of governance and have a critical bearing on many post-conflict challenges. The imperative of adequate water supply and the weakness of the state in a post-conflict period provide a nexus which demands comprehensive and well thought-out policy planning, for the short term as well as for the long term. However, very little research has been conducted on the nexus between water management and sustainable development in war-torn societies that are undergoing processes of peacebuilding. This article, after critically reviewing the contribution of water scarcity to security challenges and peacemaking, makes an attempt to contribute to the policy debate on how carefully planned interventions in the water sector can significantly contribute to the post-conflict peacebuilding process, from immediate recovery and rebuilding to long-term sustainable development goals and lasting peace.EDITOR D. Koutsoyiannis GUEST EDITOR K. Aggestam

In October 2012, Australia's parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade recommended that a mediation support unit should be created within the Australian Agency for International Development, a department now amalgamated with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The question is: Does Australia possess the motivation and capacity to implement active and effective international mediation by building the capacity of intermediaries to deploy various peacemaking methods to hasten de-escalation at different stages of a conflict? If not, is a mediation support unit an appropriate initiative to address this capability gap? This article draws on quantitative conflict data sets and an expert panel to conclude that Australia's track record demonstrates significant capacity to undertake international mediation, but that the mediation personnel and processes available to government are insufficiently resourced and coordinated to readily provide policymakers with access...

“Subject Peoples” arrived in the language of peacemaking after the Great War primarily as a way to understand post-imperial peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. As applied to the peoples of the former Ottoman Empire, however, peoples were categorized and assigned political characteristics according to specific schools of national political geography. British, French and American political geographers demarcated the ways thinking about the peoples of the Middle East that resonated throughout the century that followed.

After years of wishful thinking and failed efforts at Israeli–Palestinian peacemaking, the Obama administration has now finally acknowledged what most observers have been saying for some time—there...

During most of the events described and analyzed in Golan’s impressive book, I was involved in different ways and certainly cognizant of the different phases of what is popularly referred to as “th...

A limited body of literature has explored popular media portrayals of the prison experience. Much of this literature has focussed on film and television. Scant literature has considered new forms of media such as video games’ portrayals of the prison experience. In the current inquiry we examine the computer simulation game, Prison Architect, with respect to how its interactive experience has the potential simultaneously portray and problematize pains of imprisonment, and how these portrayals and problematizations may prompt a public discourse surrounding prison, particularly from a peacemaking perspective, even if the game itself does not incorporate concepts such as restorative justice. To conduct this analysis, we examine game-developer video blogs that relayed information about the game as it was developed (e.g., game content, rationale for creation, and embedded political, social and philosophical orientations toward prisons, prisoners, and the prison-industrial complex). Ultimately we link p...

Bunkers are concrete responses to threats, whether these be real or imagined. They are indicators of a defensive attitude and a siege mentality. My paper wishes to analyse specific sites of historical reinscription, where such constructions have undergone a process of cultural transformation which has converted them into places of creative experimentation, ludic activity and everyday use. Such initiatives in translation are important ways of reworking the past, addressing presents needs and projecting different- less reactive, and maybe more pacific- prospects for the future. A similar undertaking was proposed by Henri de Saint-Simon when he diverted the term “avant-garde” away from its military implementation towards more a progressive usage. The “avant-garde” became an experimental association of artists working together for the benefit of society as an evolving whole.In On Social Organisation Saint-Simon described the “avant-garde” as follows:They [the artists, the men of imagination] will lead the way in that great undertaking; they will proclaim the future of mankind; they will bring back the golden age from the past to enrich future generations; they will inspire society with enthusiasm for the increase of its well-being by laying before it a tempting picture of a new prosperity.Economic “prosperity” might well be an appealing prospect for “us”, especially in these times of “crisis” when “we” are made to feel that our day-to-day existence is precarious. However, when Saint-Simon employs the term “new prosperity”, he is envisaging social values that are largely incompatible with capitalist consumer “culture” and competitive “market forces”. His suggestion that new technologies should serve to nationalize “luxury” and internationalise peace would require a radically different approach to social organisation from that prevalent today. Likewise, the demilitarized bunkers I wish to analyse also figure as alternative visions for living together. They therefore also offer forms of critical resistance to the current promotion of isolating individualism, bolstered national identity and protectionist border-controls.

Around the time of the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War, France reiterated that it had no direct interest in the Korean issue, and professed to be an onlooker. But from the very beginning, in fact, France viewed the war as an opportunity to consolidate its alliance with Russia and further encroach on China’s southwest frontiers; it was therefore happy to see war break out between China and Japan, and took Russia’s position on stopping Britain from playing a dominant role in mediation between them. As the outcome of the war became clear, exposing Japan’s ambition to invade China, France turned from its wait-and-see attitude to intervention, taking an active part in the peacemaking activities of Russia, Britain and France and the triple intervention of Russia, France and Germany. In so doing, it attempted to safeguard general European interests and consolidate its alliance with Russia, as well as preventing Japan from replacing Europe as the dominant force in China. At the same time, it demanded a qu...

This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces – from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms – are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacemaking. We present six themes for this research agenda: hotels as projections of soft power, soft targets for political violence, strategic infrastructures in conflict, hosts for war reporters, providers of emergency hospitality and care, and infrastructures of peace-building. We conclude that the geopolitical potential of hotels emerges from two spatial dimensions of the relation of hospitality: hotels’ selective openness and closure to their surroundings, and their flexible material infrastructures that can facilitate and mediate geopolitical processes. Research o...

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the role of leaders in building nonviolent organizations and the role of organizations in cultivating habits of peace, thereby preparing people as peacemakers in a violent world. Leadership literature asks how to build healthy organizations; conflict literature asks how to make global peace. Both ask how people are shaped by their leaders and communities, but conversations between organizational and peace theories are minimal, as are conversations about peacemaking in local and global contexts. This study identifies practices for building nonviolent organizations, recognizing the significance of educating leaders and organizations as just peace-builders.

This study explores the factors in the ongoing intra-state conflicts in Pakistan that are affecting the lives of women and highlights their role in conflict resolution and peacemaking. Although there is considerable concern about violence against women in conflicts, the present study investigates its other multi-layered and multifaceted impact on people that are often not addressed. This was undertaken using qualitative methods, based on case studies of three women peace activists from Pakistan. The results showed that there was an inter-mingling of different types of conflict that could not be understood in isolation. However, political processes trigger many conflicts. These in turn have multiple impacts on women. The study concludes that the inclusion of women's voices in peacebuilding can ensure that their needs will be addressed during peace negotiations, which should improve the possibility of their sustainability.

A common observation regarding the Mandela Administration's foreign policy is that South Africa adopted an approach to peacemaking that drew on its own recent and unique negotiated transition. While ubiquitous, this observation has rarely been seriously examined. This paper undertakes such an examination through the use of psychological theories of decision making, which explore the formative impact that a leader's domestic rise to power has on the foreign policy predilections of that leader. These theories provide a powerful link that supports the oft stated, but poorly articulated, connection between South Africa's transition and its regional peacemaking efforts. The paper then surveys the most salient lessons learned by President Mandela during South Africa's transitional negotiations and explores whether these lessons affected South Africa's regional peacemaking efforts. This analysis indicates that both Mandela's inclination to negotiate, and the style in which he did so, were directly informed by So...

This paper presents a contractual approach to coping with difficult situations of intractable conflict where ordinary citizens are at the center of the struggle. The contractualist peacemaker challenge is to convert conflicting parties into a peacemaking community committed to resolving the conflict by peaceful means. Three main elements are necessary to transform conflicting groups into a peacemaking community: common interest: strong desire to resolve the conflict by peaceful means; rules: commitment to democratic principles of dialogue; and peacemaking institutions: an organizational device that operates and maintains peacemaking communities. A peacemaking institution that has the potential to create momentum for the establishment of a peacemaking community is a major public negotiating congress. An ideal congress invites delegations from all walks of life to negotiate solutions to the conflict. This vision is based on the multi-party talks of the 1990s that helped to create a major change in t...

Too often women in the Islamic world are understood in very narrow categories largely constructed by a foreign gaze: the exotic—belly dancers in a harem, the oppressed—young girls stoned to death i...

This paper examines four models of debriefing practices applied by the team of authors in settings working with conflict resolution and peacemaking practitioners. It examines the effectiveness of these methods in particular, and of the practice of debriefing as a reflective tool in the context of peacemaking practice. All research was conducted as part of an Applied Practice and Theory team, under the supervision of Dr. Susan Allen, at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

Pope John XXIII's final encyclical on the subject of peace, Pacem in Terris, written after the Cuban missile crisis which he helped to resolve, is an extended treatment of the basic principles of political morality and particularly significant for its adoption – the first time by the Catholic Church – of the discourse of human rights. The fundamental moral objective of state power is stated as ‘the recognition, respect, safeguarding, and promotion of the rights of the human person’, and only on this basis can peace be established. The encyclical is an important educational resource for forming peaceable and peacemaking persons.

In November 1301, Charles de Valois, brother of French King Philip IV, entered Florence at the request of Pope Boniface VIII and his Florentine allies. While Charles’ mission was ostensibly peacemaking between Florence’s Black and White factions, in reality his visit led to violence and exile of leading Whites, including Dante. Much of what we know about these events was written in retrospect, from the chronicles of Compagni and Villani to Dante’s Commedia. The Florentine Dominican Remigio dei Girolami, however, preached two sermons that week that provide a more immediate impression. One was given at the official communal welcome ceremony for Charles. The other, one of his sermons De pace, was probably given at a semi-secret peace procession mentioned by Compagni. Rhetorical analysis of these two sermons shows that Remigio tailored his message to his audience. When Charles was present, Remigio diplomatically avoided the subject of factional division, instead advising Charles on his upcoming mission to Sic...