Narrating Peace

This book provides practical tools, models, and frameworks for thinking about how a story is structured, all in order to help us think about conflict. Using examples from literature and films for developing narrative competence in everyday life, the book illustrates a new model of four basic plot types that can push a reader/viewer either toward political struggle (a justice or vindication story) or toward a journey of self-realization (a peace or reconciliation story). The examples used in the book span a wide array of conflict situations, from climate change to native American genocide, from reproductive rights and gender-based violence to Algerian independence and Arab identity, from Jim Crow segregation and civil rights to the Vietnam War and colonial collapse, from Latino educational opportunities to the liberation of Bengal and the emergence of the idea of the Global South. This simple-to-use model of story grammar is integral for the practice of both politics and peacemaking and opens a new window on literary analysis and the craft of storytelling. Along the way, it provides us with a new way to understand human purpose and offers precise definitions of the concepts of peace and justice. This book will be of great interest to students and practitioners of international relations, security studies, political theory, and peace and conflict/justice studies.

Through case studies of prominent cultural products, this book takes a longitudinal approach to the influence and conceptualization of the Civil War in democratic Spain. Stafford explores the stories told about the war during the transition to democracy and how these narratives have morphed in light of the polemics about historical memory.

The "narrative turn" has recently influenced theories, methods, and research design within the field of international relations. Its goal is, in part, to show how stories about international events and issues emerge and develop, and how these stories influence the uptake and limitations of global policy "solutions" around the world. Through the lens of narrative, this book examines the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, adopted by the United Nations Security Council twenty years ago. The agenda seeks to increase the participation of women in conflict prevention efforts and to protect the rights of women during conflict and peacebuilding. Those involved in the creation of the WPS agenda, including its strategies, guidelines, and protocols, tend to assume that implementation is the most critical element of it. But what can the stories about the agenda's emergence tell us about its limits and possibilities? Laura J. Shepherd examines WPS as a policy agenda that has been realized in and through the stories that have been told about it, focusing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. She argues that to understand the implementation of the agenda we need to also understand the narration of the agenda's beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories outline the agenda's priorities and delimit its possibilities--as well as communicate and constitute its triumphs and disasters. As the book shows, much energy and resources are expended in efforts to reduce or resolve the agenda to a singular, essential "thing"--with singular, essential meaning. There is no "true" WPS agenda that practitioners, activists, and policymakers can apprehend and use as their guide; there is only a messy and contested space for political interventions of different kinds. Shepherd shows that the narratives of the WPS agenda incorporate plural logics but that this plurality cannot--should not--be used as an alibi for limited engagement or strategic inaction. Those seeking to realize the WPS agenda might need to live with the irreconcilable, the irresolvable, and the ambiguous.

Narrating War and Peace in Africa interrogates conventional representations of Africa and African culture -- mainly in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -- with an emphasis on portrayals of conflict and peace. While Africa has experienced political and social turbulence throughout its history, more recent conflicts seem to reinforce the myth of barbarism across the continent: in Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Chad, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. The essays in this volume address reductive and stereotypical assumptions of postcolonial violence as "tribal" in nature, and offer instead various perspectives -- across disciplinary boundaries -- that foster a less fetishized, more contextualized understanding of African war, peace, and memory. Through their geographical, historical, and cultural scope and diversity, the chapters in Narrating War and Peace in Africa aim to challenge negative stereotypes that abound in relation to Africa in general and to its wars and conflicts in particular, encouraging a shift to more balanced and nuanced representations of the continent and its political and social climates. Contributors: Ann Albuyeh, Zermarie Deacon, Alicia C. Decker, Aména Moïnfar, Kayode Omoniyi Ogunfolabi, Sabrina Parent, Susan Rasmussen, Michael Sharp, Cheryl Sterling, Hetty ter Haar, Melissa Tully, Pamela Wadende, Metasebia Woldemariam, Jonathan Zilberg. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Hetty ter Haar is an independent researcher in England.

This book examines the complex role identity and religion play in global peace processes. Based on multiple case studies, this book unveils the complex role identity and religion play in peace processes across the globe. It demonstrates that the success and sustainability of a peace process depends on the systemic application of the BRIDGE model that is introduced here. This model describes five major strategies (Bonding, Reassuring, Involving, Determining Guides, and Equalizing) and numerous tactics for how peace processes and accords can deal with the central issues as well as important common challenges that run through identity-based ethnonational or religious conflicts. This represents the first comprehensive account of how the transition from enemies to neighbors is achieved and how intergroup relations and engagement are transformed in peace processes, impacting power, access to resources, legitimacy, and representation in national identity. The model also discusses what forms of peacebuilding authentically represent the interests, needs, and values of religious constituencies, and what can be learned from how religious constituencies escalate and de-escalate conflict. The book demonstrates why religion must also be included in peace processes and permanent solutions, owing to religion’s capacity to enhance commitment to bonding and peaceful values, such as justice, compassion, nonviolence, stability, care for children, and care for the environment, for the sick, the wounded, the traumatized, and the bereaved. This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, intra-state conflict, religion studies, and International Relations.

Just Security in an Undergoverned World examines how humankind can manage global problems to achieve both security and justice in an age of antithesis. Global connectivity is increasing, visibly and invisiblyin trade, finance, culture, and informationhelping to spur economic growth, technological advance, and greater understanding and freedom, but global disconnects are growing as well. Ubiquitous electronics rely on high-value minerals scraped from the earth by miners kept poor by corruption and war. People abandon burning states for the often indifferent welcome of wealthier lands whose people, in turn, draw into themselves. Humanity's very success, underwritten in large part by lighting up gigatons of long-buried carbon for 200 years, now threatens humanity's future. The global governance institutions established after World War II to manage global threats, especially the twin scourges of war and poverty, have expanded in reach and impact, while paradoxically losing the political support of some of their wealthiest and most powerful members. Their problems mimic those of their members in struggling to adapt to new problems and maintain trust in norms and public bodies. This volume argues, however, that a properly mandated, managed, and modernized global architecture offers unparalleled potential to midwife solutions to intractable issuesfrom violent conflict and climate change to poverty and pandemic diseasethat transcend borders and the capacities of individual actors. It offers just security as a new framework for charing innovating solutions and strategies for effective and essential global governance.

The "narrative turn" has recently influenced theories, methods, and research design within the field of international relations. Its goal is, in part, to show how stories about international events and issues emerge and develop, and how these stories influence the uptake and limitations of global policy "solutions" around the world. Through the lens of narrative, this book examines the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, adopted by the United Nations Security Council twenty years ago. The agenda seeks to increase the participation of women in conflict prevention efforts and to protect the rights of women during conflict and peacebuilding. Those involved in the creation of the WPS agenda, including its strategies, guidelines, and protocols, tend to assume that implementation is the most critical element of it. But what can the stories about the agenda's emergence tell us about its limits and possibilities? Laura J. Shepherd examines WPS as a policy agenda that has been realized in and through the stories that have been told about it, focusing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. She argues that to understand the implementation of the agenda we need to also understand the narration of the agenda's beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories outline the agenda's priorities and delimit its possibilities--as well as communicate and constitute its triumphs and disasters. As the book shows, much energy and resources are expended in efforts to reduce or resolve the agenda to a singular, essential "thing"--with singular, essential meaning. There is no "true" WPS agenda that practitioners, activists, and policymakers can apprehend and use as their guide; there is only a messy and contested space for political interventions of different kinds. Shepherd shows that the narratives of the WPS agenda incorporate plural logics but that this plurality cannot--should not--be used as an alibi for limited engagement or strategic inaction. Those seeking to realize the WPS agenda might need to live with the irreconcilable, the irresolvable, and the ambiguous.

Kathryn B. Feuer offers remarkable insights into Leo Tolstoy's creative process while he wrote War and Peace. She follows the novel through countless drafts and notes, and illuminates its connection to earlier, unpublished novels and to crucial new sources, both European and Russian. Additionally, Feuer locates Tolstoy within the intellectual debates of his time.