Toward Comprehensive Peace In Southeast Europe

This report, the first in a series on conflict prevention by the Center for Preventative Action (CPA) at the Council on Foreign Relations, presents recommendations to avert the spread of the ex-Yugoslav conflict into the South Balkans and to create a more enduring framework for peace and security in the region.

While European integration advances, many of the countries along Europe's eastern and southern periphery have fallen prey to chronic conflict punctuated by a series of small wars. Exacerbating the situation has been the lack of effective organizational means for mediating local conflicts, facilitating regional development and structuring cooperation with larger regional and international institutions. What are the prospects for enhancing security in the most volatile subregions of post-communist Europe? This text examines the external and internal factors that impede or foster subregional cooperation in South-Eastern and East-Central Europe and the Caucasus. It includes chapters situating these borderlands in the context of a wider Europe with an evolving security architecture.

Responsibility to Protect: Research, bibliography, background. Supplementary volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

Bosnian Refugees in Chicago: Gender, Performance, and Post-War Economies studies refugee migration through the experiences of survivors of the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia as they rebuild home, family, and social lives in the wake of their displacement. Ana Croegaert explores post-1970s Yugoslav-era socialism, American neoliberal capitalism, and anti-Muslim geopolitics to examine women’s varied perspectives on their postwar lives in the United States. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Croegaert takes readers into staged performances, coffee rituals, protests, memorials, homes, and non-governmental organizations to shine a light on the pressures women contend with in their efforts to make a living and to narrate their wartime injuries. Ultimately, Croegaert argues that refugee women insist on understanding their wartime losses as simultaneously social and material, a form of personhood she labels “injured life.” At a time of mass displacement and heated political debates concerning refugees, Croegaert provides an engaging portrait of a lively and diverse group of women whose opinions on citizenship and belonging are needed now more than ever.

The urgency to tell the story of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the only republic in the former Yugoslavia to secede without bloodshed, is made more compelling by the crisis in Kosovo. In Making Peace Prevail, Alice Ackermann offers the first in-depth account of how Macedonia—one of the few examples of successful preventive diplomacy—held onto peace during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Faced with ethnic tensions and the threat of the Bosnian war, this republic was spared the fate of Croatia and Bosnia. With this book Ackermann furthers our understanding of the challenge in conflict prevention in multiethnic and newly democratized societies. She provides a framework of analysis that underscores the "art of conflict prevention." She notes the activity of the major players such as the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) but maintains that groups such as the Working Group of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia—although not in the public eye—accomplished much through an "interactive workshop" approach to conflict management. In her epilogue Ackermann addresses the most recent developments with NATO's intervention in Kosovo and the Balkans and the internal forces at work in Macedonia, which account for its current state of stability.

Challenging the often held belief that democratization necessarily leads to aggressive ethnic nationalism and even violent conflict, this book offers an alternative account of democratization and inter-ethnic relations. It suggests that democratization can in fact help to prevent violent conflict in divided societies, as demonstrated by two case studies: Bulgaria and Macedonia. At a time when democracy promotion is increasingly becoming part of international relations and foreign policy, this study offers some poignant lessons for democratization and conflict resolution in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine to name but a few.

For the last three decades, the international response to the adverse conditions of Roma has been intensive, producing a plethora of educational policies, reforms, and strategies that have been developed and implemented. This edited volume gathers together prominent international scholars, advocates and activists, with the purpose of offering a comprehensive and integrated understanding of how historical, political, and cultural forces shape educational experiences and social policy for the Roma population in Europe. The book uses theoretical and empirical lenses to understand the formal and informal education of Roma. Through the contextualised theorisation of Roma education it illustrates, illuminates and discusses issues of wider concern. Interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks bind the chapters together and offer an in-depth examination of the questions and issues relevant to the field of education, structuring the book around three central themes: -schooling and social policy; the promises and pitfalls of multiculturalism, integration and inclusion and the deconstruction of educational policies and law -education inside and outside schools; empirical accounts of life in school and the achievements and missed opportunities of the Decade of Roma Inclusion -participation, activism and advocacy; investigating the responsibilities of Roma and non-Roma intellectuals, educators, activists and advocates. Roma Education in Europe grapples with uneven economic and political developments, and as a result, with the possibilities and shortcomings of integration, social justice, and the role of supranational agencies in changing the course of schooling and education. The book will be key reading for those researching or studying Romani studies, education, sociology, and cultural, ethnicity and immigration studies.