The Walls Between Conflict And Peace

The Walls between Conflict and Peace analyses political and social walls, their formation, their evolution into borders, and their possible disappearance as a result of reconciliation and cooperation. These processes are observed in ten practical cases.

This book addresses the challenges of international intervention in violent conflicts and its impact on groups in conflict. When the international community intervenes in a violent internal conflict, intervening powers may harden divisions, constructing walls between groups, or they may foster transformation, soften barriers and build bridges between conflicting groups. This book examines the different types of external processes and their respective contributions to softening or hardening divisions between conflicting groups. It also analyses the types of conflict resolution strategies, including integration, accommodation and partitioning, and investigates the conditions under which the international community decides to pursue a particular strategy, and how the different strategies contribute to solidification or transformation of group identities. The author uses three case studies, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine, to reveal how different types of external interventions impact on the identities of conflicting groups. The volume seeks to address how states and international organizations ought to intervene in order to stimulate the building of bridges rather than walls between conflicting groups. In doing so, the book sheds light on some of the pitfalls in international interventions and highlights the importance of united external process and inclusive identity strategies that promote transformation and bridge differences between conflicting groups. This book will be of much interest to students of intervention, peace and conflict studies, ethnic conflict, security studies and IR.

The problem of Northern Ireland is a struggle for sharing power between the Catholics and the Protestants. The structural and basic reasons of the problem have played a very important role in the evolution of it towards civil war. The most important basic reason underlying it is mutual "distrust" between parties in Northern Ireland. On this regard, some necessary steps are to be taken for the stability of the peaceful environment established after the conflict. The normalization of the society and the making of the relations between groups transparent, constitute the "rehabilitation" process itself. Rehabilitation process ensures the continuation of confidence building in schools, helps with the matter of winning future generations, and also plays an important role in ensuring confidence building in institutions. In sum the subject of this study is addressing the contributions of the rehabilitation as the protection of peace, to the social reconciliation process as formed by the societies living in Northern Ireland; and its continuation by discussing the rehabilitation process with reference to the example of Northern Ireland in the phase of transforming conflict. One of the main research questions of this study is to present the contribution of the rehabilitation process on peace within the context of conflict administration. In the first part of this book, the stage of rehabilitation in the development process of conflict administration is discussed. In the second part of this book, the structural reasons of conflict will be approached and Belfast Agreement, which can be described as a reconciliation document of parties, will be analysed. The third part is focused on how the results of the application of rehabilitation activities that are foreseen in the in the process of transforming the problem of Northern Ireland are obtained.

Developing a solid basis for future research and training, this illuminating volume facilitates peace and mutual understanding between people by addressing a root cause of social conflicts: identity constructions. The volume encompasses eight revealing empirical case studies from regions throughout the world, conducted by experts from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Each case study examines how identities are being constructed and used in the region, how these identities are related to borders and in what ways identity constructions foment peace or conflict. The volume summarizes insights gleaned from these studies and formulates an analytical framework for understanding the role of identity constructions in conflict or peace.

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998. This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches. While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity.

In Visions of Democracy and Peace in Occupied Japan, Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti examines American occupation of Japan during World War II and the evolution of Japan’s political parties to highlight the country’s struggles for a democratic and peaceful “Japanese Japan.” Using a dynamic analysis approach, Galanti examines the pre-war, pro-democratic ideals and legacies that built Japan’s political parties and the parties’ evolving views on regime matters, socioeconomic structure, international relations, and security both during and after the country’s occupation by American forces.

This encyclopaedia provides a comprehensive overview of major theories and approaches to the study of peace and conflict across different humanities and social sciences disciplines. Peace and conflict studies (PCS) is one of the major sub-disciplines of international studies (including political science and international relations), and has emerged from a need to understand war, related systems and concepts and how to respond to it afterward. As a living reference work, easily discoverable and searchable, the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies offers solid material for understanding the foundational, historical, and contemporary themes, concepts, theories, events, organisations, and frameworks concerning peace, conflict, security, rights, institutions and development. The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Peace and Conflict Studies brings together leading and emerging scholars from different disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource on peace and conflict studies ever produced.

Creating peace for a city’s intimate enemies is harder than making war. This book is about the trajectories of urban conflict and peace in the politically polarized cities of Jerusalem and Belfast since 1994 – how sometimes there has been hopeful change while at other times debilitating stasis and regression. Based on extensive research, fieldwork, and interviews, Scott Bollens shows how seeking peace in these cities is shaped by the interaction of city-based actors and national elites, and that it is not just a political process, but a social and spatial one that takes place problematically over an extended period. He intertwines academic precision with ethnography and personal narrative to illuminate the complex political and emotional kaleidoscopes of these polarized cities. With hostility and competition among groups defined by ethnic, religious, and nationalistic identity on the increase across the world, this timely investigation contributes to our understanding of today’s fractured cities and nations.