Protecting Human Rights And Building Peace In Post Violence Societies

This book critically examines the relationship between protecting human rights and building peace in post-violence societies. It explores the conditions that must be present, and strategies that should be adopted, for the former to contribute to the latter. The author argues that human rights can aid peacebuilding efforts by helping victims of past violence to articulate their grievance, and by encouraging the state to respond to and provide them with a meaningful remedy. This usually happens either through a process of adjudication, whereby human rights can offer guidance to the judiciary as to the best way to address such grievances, or through the passing and implementation of human rights laws and policies that seek to promote peace. However, this positive relationship between human rights and peace is both qualified and context specific. Through an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of four case studies, the book identifies the conditions that can support the effective use of human rights as peacebuilding tools. Developing these, the book recommends a series of strategies that peacebuilders should adopt and rely on.

'Human rights and conflict' is divided into three parts, each capturing the role played by human rights at a different stage in the conflict cycle.

After Violence: Transitional Justice, Peace, and Democracy examines the effects of transitional justice on the development of peace and democracy. Anticipated contributions of transitional justice mechanisms are commonly stated in universal terms, with little regard for historically specific contexts. Yet a truth commission, for example, will not have the same function in a society torn by long-term civil war or genocide as in a society emerging from authoritarian repression. Addressing trials, reparations, truth commissions, and amnesties, the book systematically addresses the experiences of four very different contemporary transitional justice cases: post-authoritarian Uruguay and Peru and post-conflict Rwanda and Angola. Its analysis demonstrates that context is a crucial determinant of the impact of transitional justice processes, and identifies specific contextual obstacles and limitations to these processes. The book will be of much interest to scholars in the fields of transitional justice and peacebuilding, as well as students generally concerned with human rights and democratisation.

Explores innovative ways to build peace after large-scale violence by combining resilience, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice.

This volume addresses the role and importance of education for processes of transitional justice. In the aftermath of conflict and mass violence, education has been one of the tools with which societies have sought to achieve positive transformation. While education has the potential to trigger, maintain, and exacerbate conflict, it has also been designed to promote a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the past and to advance reconciliation, peacebuilding, and prevention. The original contributions in the book reflect on lessons learned from education policies of the past in post-conflict societies and seek innovative, sustainable, and context-sensitive grassroots approaches, designed to advocate critical thinking, values of inclusion and tolerance, and ultimately a culture of peace.

This book assesses the role of human rights education (HRE) in the peacebuilding field. Today, most governments, international organisations and non-governmental organisations recognise the importance of human rights in peace- and democracy-building activities in post-conflict regions. However, compared with other components of peacebuilding, little attention and funding have been given to the cultivation of human rights knowledge and skills within these populations. Almost nothing has been committed to understanding how HRE is best accomplished in such difficult circumstances. Human Rights Education and Peacebuilding demonstrates the promise of HRE programs to help bring about peace within challenging post-conflict contexts. Each chapter of this book (a) identifies the short and medium term impacts of seven different HRE programs on their respective target groups, and (b) provides an analysis of the peculiar local contextual factors that influenced each program’s rationale for human rights education. More specifically, each chapter addresses these critical questions: - How are communities around the world using HRE to help rebuild their lives in the aftermath of an armed conflict? - How does HRE respond local problems and needs? How similar are the human rights impacts in the different projects? - How can we understand the promise and challenges associated with HRE as a component of community peace-building? This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, human rights, education studies and IR in general.

This volume sheds new light upon the role of victims in the aftermath of violence. Victims are central actors in transitional justice, the politics of memory and conflict resolution, yet the analysis of their mobilisation and political influence in these processes has been neglected. After introducing and explaining the reasons for this limited interest, the book’s chapters focus on a range of settings and draw on different disciplines to offer insights into the interrelated themes of victimhood – victims, their individual and collective identities, and their role in and impact upon post-conflict societies – and the politics of victimhood – meaning how victimhood is defined, negotiated and contested, both socially and politically. Because it outlines a stimulating research agenda and challenges the view that victims are passive or apolitical, this interdisciplinary volume is a significant contribution to the literature and will be of interest to scholars from disciplines such as law, anthropology, political science, human rights, international studies, and to practitioners.

This work examines trauma, identity, security, education, and development as issues of critical importance to peacebuilding and social reconstruction after large-scale violence. This violence takes the form of war, mass-killings, and genocide, as well as structural violence that has humiliated and impoverished millions of people across the globe. Transitional justice, leadership, religion, and the arts are other crucial issues that are included in this analysis of violence and its transformation. The book explores how each issue can be independently addressed for transformational purposes, but argues for their active interdependence in order to more effectdvely help individuals, communities, and societies emerge from violence and begin the rebuilding process. Peacebuilding for Traumatized Societies examines these issues in theoretical and practical terms through case studies and descriptions of training and problem-solving procedures in Rwanda, the Balkans, Columbia, and the Philippines. Book jacket.