Ritual And Symbol In Peacebuilding

* Serves as a guide to using ritual acts in peacebuilding efforts * Abundant with examples of symbolic acts that aided the peace process Conflict is dramatic. In theater, literature, story telling, and news reporting, it is a powerful mechanism that draws attention, heightens the senses and evokes emotion. Schirch argues that peacebuilding has the potential to do just the same. Examples of peacebuilding often center on the serious, rational negotiations and formal problem-solving efforts in conflict situations. Schirch argues, though, that what truly bonds adversaries and helps achieve peace are the symbolic, non-verbal ritual acts--shaking hands, sharing a meal, showing a photograph of a loved one. Yet these are often overlooked as deliberate components of peace negotiations. Ritual and Symbol in Peacebuilding underscores the importance of incorporating symbolic tools, including ritual, into traditional approaches to conflict. Ritual assists in solving complex, deep-rooted conflicts, and helps to confirm and transform worldviews, identities, and relationships. With theories and language to explain the symbolic dimensions of conflict, this text will be useful to scholars and practitioners active in the diverse field of peacebuilding.

Restorative justice is an innovative approach to responding to crime and conflict that shifts the focus away from laws and punishment to instead consider the harm caused and what is needed to repair that harm and make things right. Interest in restorative justice is rapidly expanding, with new applications continuously emerging around the world. The restorative philosophy and conference process have shown great promise in providing a justice response that heals individuals and strengthens the community. Still, a few key questions remain unanswered. First, how is the personal and relational transformation apparent in the restorative justice process achieved? What can be done to safeguard and enhance that effectiveness? Second, can restorative justice satisfy the wider public’s need for a reaffirmation of communal norms following a crime, particularly in comparison to the criminal trial? And finally, given its primary focus on making amends at an interpersonal level, does restorative justice routinely fail to address larger, structural injustices? This book engages with these three critical questions through an understanding of restorative justice as a ritual. It proffers three dominant ritual functions related to the performance of justice: the normative, the transformative, and the proleptic. Two justice rituals, namely, the criminal trial and the restorative justice conference, are examined through this framework in order to understand how each process fulfills, or fails to fulfill, the multifaceted human need for justice. The book will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners working in the areas of Restorative Justice, Criminal Law, and Criminology.

This book highlights the important role youth can play in processes of peacebuilding by examining music as a tool for engaging youth in such activities. As Lesley J. Pruitt discusses throughout the book, music—as expression, as creation, as inspiration—can provide many unique insights into transforming conflicts, altering our understandings, and achieving change. She offers detailed empirical work on two youth peacebuilding programs in Australia and Northern Ireland, countries that appear overtly peaceful, but where youth still face structural violence and related direct violence at the community level. She also pays careful attention to the ways in which gender norms might influence young people's participation in music-based peacebuilding activities. Ultimately, the book defines a new research area linking youth cultures and music with peacebuilding practice and policy.

This book examines the performative life reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives, as well as the way the past is mobilized and reworked in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the 'age of apology'.

Authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including English, Theology, Philosophy, Communications, Sociology, Humanities and Peace Studies, this edited volume provides detailed descriptions of the many ways popular culture can be used to teach peace. Chapters discuss documentary and feature film, music, television, literature and more, providing both educators and the general public with a timely and useful tool. From popular dystopian novels like The Hunger Games to feature films like The Matrix to modern rap and hip-hop music, contributors not only provide critical analysis of the violence in popular culture but also an assessment of how the same or alternate forms can be used by peace educators. Additionally, each chapter project synopses and teaching ideas, as well as recommended resources.

Courageous artists working in conflict regions describe exemplary peacebuilding performances and groundbreaking theory on performance for transformation of violence. Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict is a two-volume work describing peacebuilding performances in regions beset by violence and internal conflicts. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, emphasizes the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of direct violence, while Volume II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities, focuses on the transformative power of performance in regions fractured by "subtler" forms of structural violence and social exclusion. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence focuses on the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of violence. The performances highlighted in this volume nourish and restore capacities for expression, communication, and transformative action, and creatively support communities in grappling with conflicting moral imperatives surrounding questions of justice, memory, resistance, and identity. The individual chapters, written by scholars, conflict resolution practitioners, and artists who work directly with the communities involved, offer vivid firsthand accounts and analyses of traditional and nontraditional performances in Serbia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, Argentina, Peru, India, Cambodia, Australia, and the United States. Complemented by a website of related materials, a documentary film, Acting Together on the World Stage, that features clips and interviews with the curators and artists, and a toolkit, or "Tools for Continuing the Conversation," that is included with the documentary as a second disc, this book will inform and inspire socially engaged artists, cultural workers, peacebuilding scholars and practitioners, human rights activists, students of peace and justice studies, and whoever wishes to better understand conflict and the power of art to bring about social change. The Acting Together project is born of a collaboration between Theatre Without Borders and the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. The two volumes are edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, director of the aforementioned program and a leading figure in creative approaches to coexistence and reconciliation; Roberto Gutierrez Varea, an award-winning director and associate professor at the University of San Francisco; and Polly O. Walker, director of Partners in Peace, an NGO based in Brisbane, Australia..

The profession of peacemaking has been practiced by indigenous communities around the world for many centuries; however, the ethnocentric world view of the West, which dominated the world of ideas for the last five centuries, dismissed indigenous forms of peacemaking as irrelevant and backward tribal rituals. Neither did indigenous forms of peacemaking fit the conception of modernization and development of the new ruling elites who inherited the postcolonial state. The new profession of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), which emerged in the West as a new profession during the 1970s, neglected the tradition and practice of indigenous forms of peacemaking. The scant literature which has appeared on this critical subject tends to focus on the ritual aspect of the indigenous practices of peacemaking. The goal of this book is to fill this lacuna in scholarship. More specifically, this work focuses on the process of peacemaking, exploring the major steps of process of peacemaking which the peacemakers follow in dislodging antagonists from the stage of hostile confrontation to peaceful resolution of disputes and eventual reconciliation. The book commences with a critique of ADR for neglecting indigenous processes of peacemaking and then utilizes case studies from different communities around the world to focus on the following major themes: the basic structure of peacemaking process; change and continuity in the traditions of peacemaking; the role of indigenous women in peacemaking; the nature of the tools peacemakers deploy; common features found in indigenous processes of peacemaking; and the overarching goals of peacemaking activities in indigenous communities.

Globally, where faith and political processes share the public space with indigenous populations, religious leaders of tolerant voice, who desire to transcend the conflict that often divides their peoples, are coming forward. Affirming and enabling these leaders is increasingly becoming the focus of the reconciliation efforts of peace builders, both internally and externally to existing conflict. By way of theoretical analysis and documented case studies from a number of countries, Military Chaplains as Agents of Peace considers Religious Leader Engagement (RLE) as an emerging domain that advances the cause of reconciliation via the religious peace building of chaplains: A construct that may be generalized to expeditionary, humanitarian, and domestic operational contexts. An overview of the benefits and limitations of RLE is offered and accompanied by a candid discussion of a number of the more perplexing questions related to such operational ministry: Influence Activities, Information Gathering for Intelligence Purposes, and the Protected (Non-Combatant) Status of Chaplains.