This book examines the role of local peacebuilders in Northern Ireland and some of the challenges they face. The work explores the perspective and experiences of local peacebuilders in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland about their analysis and critique of liberal peacebuilding, their hopes, and concerns, and how they are aligned with external funders. It features interviews with a plethora of civil society organization workers, funding agency community development officers, and civil servants adjudicating the International Fund for Ireland and the European Union Peace and Rconciliation Fund, which highlight the participants’ local wisdom, practices, and values regarding creating sustainable livelihoods, peacebuilding insights, receiving recognition for their work, dissonance with internal and external actors, conflict transformation efforts, and and engagement with partners and allies. The rich empirical qualitative exploratory case study, situated in post-peace accord Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland, speaks to the respondents’ ideas about the creation, delivery, and efficacy of peacebuilding-funded initiatives as well as their hopes and dreams for the future. In exploring this central argument, the work offers an overarching structure in which to analyze the theory and praxis of conflict and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. More generally, it offers an important contribution to our understanding of local peacebuilders, and how economic assistance impacts on a divided society. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, sociology, and British and Irish politics.

Using empirical qualitative research, this book conceptualises and demonstrates the value of local practical knowledge for peacebuilding in the context of Northern Ireland. There are increasing calls to involve local people to ensure legitimacy, relevance, and sustainability when seeking to build peace and transform violent conflict. However, as peacebuilding becomes increasingly professionalised, this raises fundamental questions about whose knowledge matters for building peace and what kind of knowledge matters. Seeking to address these questions and to learn from applied practice, this book provides a qualitative empirical research study, investigating 40 practitioners active in conflict transformation at a grassroots level in Northern Ireland over 50 years. This research led not only to recapturing lost knowledge from practitioners, but also to a neglected ‘virtue’ – the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom, phronesis. This book argues that phronesis has deepened our understanding of why ‘local’ practical knowledge is vitally important and calls for its global rediscovery as knowledge necessary for building sustainable peace. This book will be of much interest to practioners and students in the fields of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, philosophy, and British and Irish politics.

This book examines the role of economic aid in the management and resolution of protracted ethnic conflicts, focusing on the case study of Northern Ireland. The book describes the results of a study of the role of economic aid within Northern Ireland, through the viewpoints of citizens collected in an opinion poll as well as community group leaders whose projects received funding, funding-agency civil servants and development officers. The study explains the importance of economic and social development in promoting cross-community contact as well as within single-identity communities, and the need for a multitrack intervention approach to transform the conflict in Northern Ireland. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of how economic assistance impacts on a divided society with a history of protracted violence and provides important perspectives on the "peace through development" idea. One of the key unanswered questions relating to economic aid and preventing future violence is that of the significance of external economic aid in building peace after violence. By examining the respondents’ political imagery, this book expands on existing work on economic aid and peace building in other societies coming out of violence. Northern Ireland’s changing social-economic and political context reflects the fact that economic aid and sustainable economic development is a cornerstone of the peacebuilding process. The goal of the book is to provide a foundational knowledge base for students and practitioners about the role of economic aid in building the peace dividend in post-accord societies. The book will be of great interest to students of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, Irish politics, peace and conflict studies, and politics and IR in general.

However, it is important to note that economic aid to promote a change in Northern Ireland's economic well-being is also tied into the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which has, at its center, a comprehensive range of new political power-sharing institutions."

Since the troubles began in the late 1960s, people in Northern Ireland have been working together to bring about a peaceful end to the conflict. Building Peace in Northern Irelandexamines the different forms of peace and reconciliation work that have taken place. Maria Power has brought together an international group of scholars to examine initiatives such as integrated education, faith-based peace building, cross-border cooperation, and women's activism, as well as the impact that government policy and European funding have had upon the development of peace and reconciliation organizations.

This book incorporates recent research that emphasizes the need for civil society and a grassroots approach to peacebuilding while taking into account a variety of perspectives, including neoconservatism and revolutionary analysis. The contributions, which include the reflections of those involved in the negotiation and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, also provide policy prescriptions for modern conflicts.

This book provides a multidisciplinary collection of essays that seek to explore the deeply problematic legacy of post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Thus, the authors of this book look at a number of issues that continue to stymie the development of a robust and sustainable peacebuilding project, including segregation, contested parades and flags, ethnic party mobilization, and memorialization. Towards addressing these contemporary issues, authors are drawn from a range of disciplines, including politics, history, literature, drama, cultural studies, sociology, and social psychology.

This book explains how facilitative mediators, those without material leverage, contribute to progress in peace negotiations. While existing theories of mediation have offered suggestions about what a mediator should get parties to do to reach an agreement, the puzzle that has remained is: how does a mediator get parties to do what is prescribed? The book argues that a communication perspective is key to understanding facilitative mediation and that framing is the main mechanism by which facilitative mediation functions. Based on an empirical analysis of the United Nations mediation in El Salvador between 1990 and 1992, the work breaks new ground by uncovering three underlying mechanisms that explain how a mediator can get their framing adopted by the negotiating parties, thereby advancing the negotiations. The book offers a novel theory of facilitative mediation as framing and an innovative methodological approach that focuses on negotiation impasses to study the process of how negotiations progress. Practitioners will also appreciate the framework for thinking about when and how framing and reframing can be used to increase mediation’s effectiveness as a tool for ending armed conflict. This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, negotiation, Latin American politics, and International Relations, as well as practitioners.

This volume explores the evolution of theoretical and practical approaches to intervening in protracted conflicts, following the work of Herb Kelman. Interactive problem solving, as developed by Kelman and others, sought to increase understanding about the microprocesses of international relations. Kelman early on emphasised the centrality of an interactive approach for constructing new identities, new narratives, and new ways forward. Transforming conflict systems requires strategic attention to the interactions between agents of change that provide stability or induce shift. This volume on interactive conflict approaches includes both critical reflections and new ideas from scholar-practitioners who have developed, revised, and expanded these approaches. Contributors take up important issues, from the shape and likelihood of solutions in intractable conflicts to how individuals can exist in realities with seemingly irresolvable inner and outer conflicts. The volume represents the best of current thinking about how the mechanisms, theoretical framework, and application of interactive problem solving should be moved into the twenty-first century context of increasing complexity, increasing uncertainty, and increasing polarisation. This book will be of interest to students of peace studies, conflict resolution, and international relations.