From Mediation To Nation Building

The eruption in the early 1990s of highly visible humanitarian crises and exceedingly bloody civil wars in the Horn of Africa, imploding Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, set in motion a trend towards third party intervention in communal conflict in areas as far apart as the Balkans and East Timor. However haltingly and selectively, that trend towards extra-systemic means of managing ethnic and national conflict is still discernible, motivated as it was in the 1990s by the inability of in-house accommodation methods to resolve ethno-political conflicts peacefully and the tendency of such conflicts to spill into the international system in the form of massive refugee flows, regional instability, and failed states hosting criminal and terrorist elements. In its various forms, third party intervention has become a fixed part of the current international system Our book examines the various forms in which that intervention occurs, from the least intrusive and costly forms of third party activity to the most intrusive and expensive endeavors. More specifically, organized in the form of overview essays followed by case studies that explore the utility and limitations, successes and failures of various forms of third party activity in managing conflict, the book begins by examining diplomatic intervention and then proceeds to cover, in turn, legal, economic, and military instruments of conflict management before concluding with a section on political tutelage arrangements and nation/capacity building operations. The chapters themselves are authored by a mix of contributors drawn from relevant disciplines, both senior and younger scholars, academics and practitioners, and North Americans and Europeans. All treat a common theme but no attempt was made to solicit work from contributors with a common orientation towards the value of third party intervention. Nor were the authors straight-jacketed with heavy content guidelines from the editors. Their essays validate the value of this approach. Far from being chaotic in nature, they generally supplement one another, while offering opposing viewpoints on the overall topic; for example, our Italian contributor who specializes in non-government organizations offers a chapter illustrating their utility under certain conditions, whereas the chapter from an Afghan practitioner notes the downside of too much reliance on NGOs in nation-building operations. The essays also cover topics not often treated, and are written from the viewpoint of those on the ground. The chapter on creating a police force in post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, reads much like a diary from the American colonel who was sent to Bosnia in early 1996 charged with that task.

Ending identity conflicts through negotiated agreements is an intractable process that is embedded complexly in the nation-building process. Ariel Hernandez looks on the complexity of the nation-building process in the Philippines and how its social and political context constrains the achievement of a peace agreement that would withhold new challenges as the process unfolds. Mediation as one of the possible modes of intervention to resolve identity conflicts is taken as the self-evident instrument to end the 40 year old conflict between the Filipino society at large and the Bangsamoro. The analysis confirms that mediation and other types of intervention are contributing to the intractability of identity conflicts by bringing in further complexities in the negotiation process. The conceptualization of “stumbling blocks” may provide knowledge based resources to develop strategies to “facilitate” the mediation process that allows negotiating parties to cope with the complexity of the bargaining table.

The authors aim to show that traditional Blackfoot ceremonies provide a specific framework for decision-making that can be used as a model for present day health service delivery and offer other potential applications of the model in decision-making and mediation processes.

"Introduces an innovative, practical approach to resolving an enduring issue: How can conflicts be resolved in polarized societies and fragile states?"--

Despite the wealth of research on external interventions and practices of Western peacebuilding, many scholars tend to rely on findings in the so-called 'post-agreement' phase of interventions. As a result, most mainstream peacebuilding literature pays limited or no attention to the linkages that exist between mediation practices in the negotiation phase and processes in the post-peace agreement phase of intervention. By linking the motives and practices of interveners during negotiation and implementation phases into a more integrated theoretical framework, this book makes a unique contribution to the on-going debate on the so-called Western 'liberal' models of peacebuilding. Drawing upon in-depth case-studies this innovative volume examines a variety of political motives behind third party interventions, thus challenging the very founding concept of mediation literature. ... [from the publisher]

For over fifty years, the people of South Sudan fought for the right to be citizens of an independent nation-state. When this goal was finally achieved, however, it quickly became evident that the South Sudanese nation was not nearly as cohesive as hoped. The result has been a catastrophic civil war. Spanning South Sudan's nation-building struggle from its inception up until the current civil war, this book challenges the notion that the continued violence of this process can be reduced to either identity difference or the fault of individual leaders. Rather, it uses the leadership process to understand the complex progressions and relationships that have characterised South Sudan's nation-building trajectory. The book argues that the core driving force behind the current conflict in South Sudan can be found not in ethnicity, the “resource curse” or power struggle, but in a set of destructive relationships that have fueled violence and oppression in the country for the better part of a century. This cyclical leadership process has entrapped the country in an increasingly destructive and contradictory nation-building process that continues to spiral and disintegrate.

Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel presents twenty-two original essays offering a critical survey of the anthropology of Israel inspired by Alex Weingrod, emeritus professor and pioneering scholar of Israeli anthropology. In the late 1950s Weingrod’s groundbreaking ethnographic research of Israel’s underpopulated south complicated the dominant social science discourse and government policy of the day by focusing on the ironies inherent in the project of Israeli nation building and on the process of migration prompted by social change. Drawing from Weingrod’s perspective, this collection considers the gaps, ruptures, and juxtapositions in Israeli society and the cultural categories undergirding and subverting these divisions. Organized into four parts, the volume examines our understanding of Israel as a place of difference, the disruptions and integrations of diaspora, the various permutations of Judaism, and the role of symbol in the national landscape and in Middle Eastern studies considered from a comparative perspective. These essays illuminate the key issues pervading, motivating, and frustrating Israel’s complex ethnoscape.

"This volume analyzes the impediments that local conditions pose to successful outcomes of nation-building interventions in conflict-affected areas. Previous RAND studies of nation-building focused on external interveners' activities. This volume shifts the focus to internal circumstances, first identifying the conditions that gave rise to conflicts or threatened to perpetuate them, and then determining how external and local actors were able to modify or work around them to promote enduring peace. It examines in depth six varied societies: Cambodia, El Salvador, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It then analyzes a larger set of 20 major post-Cold War nation-building interventions. The authors assess the risk of renewed conflict at the onset of the interventions and subsequent progress along five dimensions: security, democratization, government effectiveness, economic growth, and human development. They find that transformation of many of the specific conditions that gave rise to or fueled conflict often is not feasible in the time frame of nation-building operations but that such transformation has not proven essential to achieving the primary goal of nation-building -- establishing peace. Most interventions in the past 25 years have led to enduring peace, as well as some degree of improvement in the other dimensions assessed. The findings suggest the importance of setting realistic expectations -- neither expecting nation-building operations to quickly lift countries out of poverty and create liberal democracies, nor being swayed by a negative stereotype of nation-building that does not recognize its signal achievements in the great majority of cases."--Page 4 of cover.