In marked contrast to literary, historical and cultural studies, there has been a limited engagement with the concepts and politics of trauma by political science and peacebuilding research. This book explores the debate on trauma and peacebuilding and presents the challenges for democratization that the politics of trauma present in transitional periods. It demonstrates how ideas about reconciliation are filtered through ideological lenses and become new ways of articulating communal and ethno-nationalist sentiments. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Iris Marion Young and with specific reference to the Northern Irish transition, it argues for a shift in focus from the representation of trauma towards its reception and calls for a more substantive approach to the study of democracy and post-conflict peacebuilding. This text will be of interest to scholars and students of peace and conflict studies, ethnic and nationalism studies, transitional justice studies, gender studies, Irish politics, nationalism and ethnicity.

This updated and revised second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding contains cutting-edge analyses of contemporary attempts to reach and sustain peace. The book covers the main actors and dynamics of peacebuilding, as well as the main challenges that it faces, with accessible chapters. The volume is comprehensive, covering everything from the main international institutions for peacebuilding to the links between peacebuilding and climate change, or peacebuilding and trauma. It is also firmly interdisciplinary, with a number of chapters devoted to showcasing how different disciplines interpret peacebuilding and how they contribute to it. Bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners on peacebuilding, many from the Global South, the handbook offers a valuable “hands-on” perspective on how peace can be secured and sustained. There is a significant emphasis on comparison and the book shows how peacebuilding is best examined from the vantage point of multiple cases. The book is organised into six thematic sections: Part I: Architecture and Actors Part II: Reading Peacebuilding Part III: Issues and Approaches Part IV: Violence and Security Part V: Everyday Living Part VI: Disciplinary Approaches This book will be essential reading for students of peacebuilding, mediation and post-conflict reconstruction, and of great interest to students of statebuilding, intervention, civil wars, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

This book challenges the understanding of ‘difference’ in the field of peacebuilding and offers new ways to consider diversity in the context of international interventions. International peacebuilding as a practice and academic field has always been embroiled in the ‘problem’ of difference. For mainstream scholars and policy-makers, local views, histories, and cultural codes are often seen as an obstacle on the way to peace. For critical scholars, international interventions have failed because of the very superficial attention given to the needs, values, and experience of the people in post-conflict societies. Yet the current proposals of hybrid peace and emancipation seem to reproduce Eurocentric lenses and problematic binaries. Differently inspired by feminist, post-structuralist, and new materialist perspectives, the authors assembled in this volume give sustained attention to the theorisation and practice of difference. Taken together, these contributions show that differences are always multidimensional, non-essential, and are reflections of broader power and gender inequalities. This book thus makes a major contribution to the field of critical peacebuilding by revisiting the ‘problem’ of difference. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

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.

There is growing interest among scholars and practitioners in how the arts can help rebuild post-conflict societies. This edited collection explores a range of musical practices for social and political peace. By presenting case studies in each chapter, the aim is to engage with musicality in relation to time, space, peace-building, healing, and reconciliation. Emerging scholars' work on Latin America, especially Colombia, and on the African Great Lakes region, including Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Kenya, is brought together with the purpose of reflecting critically on 'music for peace-building' initiatives. Each author considers how legacies of violence are addressed and sometimes overcome; lyrics are examined as a source of insights. These practical “music for peace-building” initiatives include NGO work with youth hip-hop, music for peace, work in education on memory, as well as popular culture and shared rituals. Special attention is paid to historical and contextual settings, to the temporal and spatial dimension of musicality and to youth and gender in peace-building through music.

Based on interviews and conversations in the Bosnian Federation with women survivors of war rape, children born of rape and armed conflict, leaders of NGOs who work with survivors, and people who lived through the war and who experienced it in different ways, this book challenges one dimensional representations of the Yugoslav war and subsequent peacebuilding processes. Relying on feminist ethnography and autoethnography, this volume offers systematic engagement with the politics of representation of Bosnia and survivors of war in post-war journalism and scholarship. Through rich and varied individual experiences of wartime violence and recovery that go beyond simple ‘us’ versus ‘them’ narratives of ethnic identity and intolerance, the book shows how public and private, individual and collective discourses actively shape one another and contribute to complex forms of engagement in recovery, healing and rebuilding. The author draws upon archival material to undermine the fetishization of ethnicity as a determining category that often underpins journalistic and scholarly accounts of post-war Bosnia. By retracing and repairing separations between individual and collective remembrance, and by complicating linear and monolithic conception of this process, the narratives in the book actively contest reductionist and instrumentalist accounts of the civil war in Bosnia. The book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interest in memory, peacebuilding, national identity, gendered violence and processes of reconciliation

The politics of peace has undergone tremendous changes since the end of the Cold War: It moved from an ideological debate into a well-established policy field. How does this affect its content? And, what are the implications for peace research? On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, the Swiss Peace Foundation (swisspeace) invited contributions from eminent experts regarding the most controversial issues of this debate, which include state building, international interventions, civil society, and business actors. The book concludes with some thoughts on the interaction between research and politics. (Series: Internationale Politik - Vol. 3)

This book explores the role of listening in community engagement and peacebuilding efforts, bridging academic research in communication and practical applications for individual and social change. For all their differences, community engagement and peacebuilding efforts share much in common: the need to establish and agree on achievable and measurable goals, the importance of trust, and the need for conflict management, to name but a few. This book presents listening – considered as a multi-disciplinary concept related to but distinct from civility, civic participation, and other social processes – as a primary mechanism for accomplishing these tasks. Individual chapters explore these themes in an array of international contexts, examining topics such as conflict resolution, restorative justice, environmental justice, migrants and refugees, and trauma-informed peacebuilding. The book includes contemporary literature reviews and theoretical insights covering the role of listening as related to individual, social, and governmental efforts to better engage communities and build, maintain, or establish peace in an increasingly divided world. This collection provides invaluable insight to researchers, students, educators, and practitioners in intercultural and international communication, conflict management, peacebuilding, community engagement, and international studies.

In this book, Tale Steen-Johnsen explains how religious peacebuilders are limited by both formal and more subtle political strategies aimed at regulating civil society. Political authorities have a vested interest in keeping social and religious movements under control, which limits the opportunities religious leaders have to diminish violent conflicts between religious groups. This volume offers empirical examples of these connections in Ethiopia, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanzania. It is valuable resource for both scholars and development practitioners interested in how politics and religion become conflated when religious actors engage to build peace.

This book aims to bridge the gap between what are generally referred to as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to peacebuilding. After the experience of a physical and psychological trauma, the period of individual healing and recovery is intertwined with political and social reconciliation. The prospects for social and political reconciliation are undermined when a ‘top-down’ approach is favoured over the ‘bottom-up strategy’- the prioritization of structural stability over societal well-being. Peacebuilding, Memory and Reconciliation explores the inextricable link between psychological recovery and socio-political reconciliation, and the political issues that dominate this relationship. Through an examination of the construction of social narratives about or for peace, the text offers a new perspective on peacebuilding, which challenges and questions the very nature of the dichotomy between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, social psychology, political science and IR in general.