David Mitchell

• Professor (Associate) at Trinity College Dublin

This chapter begins by discussing the meaning of peacebuilding and the limitations of liberal peacebuilding, that is, building peace through focussing on creating a liberal state. Then it examines peace processes—what they are and why they appear. It looks at peace agreements and one of the common political solutions that has been applied to confli...

This chapter shows how gender shapes war and, in turn, the realities of war shape how societies ‘do’ gender. Militarised practices of masculinity; gendered national protection myths; and the violence done to gendered bodies in war are just some themes that will be used to illustrate the centrality of gender analysis to understanding war. In outlini...

This chapter traces the roots of conflict in the development of the modern international states system, since it is the state which is the focus of contemporary violent political conflicts. It pays close attention to the ideology of nationalism and its claim that nations exist and they have exclusive rights to territorial states. Then, the chapter...

This chapter examines key debates and practices in the field of transitional justice. It explains the emergence of the field in the 1980s and discusses how transitional justice usually seeks to be restorative justice. It deals with the past for the sake of the future, aiming not simply to mete out punishment but to address past harm using multiface...

In this chapter the concept of ‘forced displacement/migration’ is first defined and unpacked. Then the intrinsic connections between war and forced migration are examined. While displacement may seem to be ‘collateral damage’ in war, the historical and contemporary record demonstrates that displacement is often done with strategic intent. The chapt...

This chapter develops the idea of civil society as a space for peace activism and peacebuilding through which the necessity of the ‘local turn’ can be realised. This chapter also lays conceptual groundwork for understanding the peacebuilding potential of actors discussed in later chapters—for example, the role of sports associations in reconciliati...

This chapter begins by exploring the issues of aid effectiveness in conflict-affected societies, followed by the introduction of the ‘Do No Harm’ discourse in the international aid community and the conceptual understanding of conflict sensitivity. The chapter then moves on to examine the link between international development and peacebuilding, wi...

The idea that collective security can be created between nation states has been the basis for several international political initiatives, especially through the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries, epitomised by the League of Nations and then the United Nations. Yet, the record of these collective security institutions as maintainers of peace (wheth...

This chapter discusses key characteristics of Peace Studies: its emergence, transdisciplinarity, normativity, practical orientation, as well as its epistemological and ontological dimensions. It also provides an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter focusses on a range of societal domains through which reconciliation and a culture of peace can and should be nourished: education and the media; arts, symbols, and ritual; sport; and space and the built environment. The chapter begins by exploring the concepts of reconciliation and a culture of peace and the mechanisms and potential f...

This chapter begins by considering how to define religion, before discussing the difficulties with the popular notions of ‘religious conflict’ and ‘religious violence’. The next section delineates the connection between religion and group identity, since it is through this association that religion so often becomes a conspicuous dimension of confli...

This chapter reviews the diverse conceptualisations of peace in Peace Studies, with special attention to the effort to understand ‘positive peace’. It discusses the different perspectives of Peace Studies scholars on how peace can be more just and sustainable, and the difference between liberal and emancipatory perspectives on international and loc...

One of the capacities of civil society in peace processes is the promotion of peace-oriented attitudes among citizens through peace education. This article investigates how civil society peace education may be enhanced through collaboration with counterparts in another conflict arena. The article begins by discussing the potential and pitfalls of t...

A rich and complex literature on reconciliation has emerged in response to political transitions since the 1990s, yet reconciliation’s value as a concept within peace studies is unclear. Definitions are contested, impressionistic or overlap with other concepts, while ‘reconciliation’ remains politically contested in many conflict-affected societies...

Full article is at: https://www.acu.ac.uk/the-acu-review/sport-and-peace-in-northern-ireland/ Journal: Association of Commonwealth Universities Review Magazine. A deep religious, cultural and political fault line runs through Northern Ireland (NI) society, with Protestants and Catholics divided in numerous ways. They tend to live in different are...

This chapter analyses unionism after 1998, looking back to the Good Friday Agreement and ahead from Brexit. Rather than a chronological or thematic structure, the chapter focuses on four key realities which, it is argued, have defined unionism’s experience since 1998. First, the 1998 Agreement posed genuine political and moral difficulties for unio...

This chapter begins by setting out the interlocking guiding concepts of the book – peace processes, peacebuilding, and reconciliation – which are long established and studied in the Peace Studies field, and which together represent the transformation required in intractable conflicts such as those in Ireland and Korea. Then the rationale for the co...

This article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on sport’s peacebuilding capacity by comparing the role of sport in two peace processes, Northern Ireland and Korea. Uniquely, the analysis is guided by the concept of strategic peacebuilding which goes beyond the much-criticised liberal peacebuilding ‘toolkit’ and emphasises the importanc...

The growth of the Sport for Development and Peace movement has provoked considerable scholarly interrogation of the claimed social benefits of sport. However, little is known of public attitudes to the topic. This article reports research carried out in Northern Ireland regarding sport as a means of bringing divided communities together. Respondent...

The goal of ‘learning’ from peace processes is widely expressed in conflict resolution scholarship and practice but inadequately understood. This article investigates what kinds of knowledge can be learned from a peace process, the theoretical and methodological bases of such learning, and what impact it may have. The article begins with an interdi...

Exchanges of expertise and experience between personnel involved in different peace processes are now a common feature of peacemaking worldwide. However, the goals, methods and impact of such interactions have been subject to little research. This article is the first scholarly analysis of what is here called ‘comparative consultation’. The article...

L’Etang (2008) notes that public relations histories have tended to focus on institutional, organisational, professional and biographical spheres or have engaged with histories of ideas which have shaped concepts, theories and thinking about public relations. She suggests that other, perhaps less inward looking, areas are ripe for exploration and t...

L’Etang (2008) notes that public relations histories have tended to focus on institutional, organisational, professional and biographical spheres or have engaged with histories of ideas which have shaped concepts, theories and thinking about public relations. She suggests that other, perhaps less inward looking, areas are ripe for exploration and t...

This paper will analyse the strategies, attitudes and broad experience of unionism after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It makes five main arguments. First, in the light of the genuine political and moral difficulties that the Agreement posed for unionism, the political divisions that resulted from the deal were not surprising. Second, although th...

Technology transfer of a small volume continuous (SVC) process and Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) manufacturing of merestinib are described. A hybrid batch-SVC campaign was completed at a contract manufacturing organization under cGMP. The decision process by which unit operations were selected for implementation in flow for the cGMP c...

Development of a small volume continuous process to manufacture the small molecule oncolytic candidate merestinib is described. Continuous processing was enabled following the identification and development of suitable chemical transformations and unit operations. Aspects of the nascent process control strategy were evaluated in the context of a 20...

This article critically reassesses one of the classic ideas in International Relations, the security dilemma. It argues that the key insight of security dilemma theory has been obscured – by reductionist debates on single causes of conflict, inconclusive applications, and definitional disputes – and that the security dilemma’s enduring utility is a...

This article aims to examine the impact of the Agreement on political cooperation. It examines party political cooperation in Northern Ireland and also bilateral British–Irish intergovernmental cooperation. In the first section, the Agreement’s consociational system and its criticisms are outlined. In the second section, the effect of the Agreement...

Through a case study of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, this article examines the contention that consociational power-sharing, in its determination to include dominant and conflicting identity groups, exalts these identities and excludes others including gender, class and other ethnicities and nationalities. The article describes and asses...

It remains an open question whether power-sharing can operate with sufficient mutual trust when the main parties have diametrically opposed aspirations for the future of the region.

A new synthesis of a key indazole-containing building block for the MET kinase inhibitor merestinib was designed and demonstrated. Crucial to the successful construction of the challenging indazole is an SNAr reaction, which forges the heterocyclic ring. Continuous processing was applied to two of the five steps: nitration of a benzaldehyde and hig...

Language is frequently present in the conflictual symbolic politics of violent inter-group conflict. In Northern Ireland, the Irish language has long been contested and has been drawn into the maelstrom of cultural conflict since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement; hence the improbability of an Irish language learning/teaching initiative, operating sin...

Advances in drug potency and tailored therapeutics are promoting pharmaceutical manufacturing to transition from a traditional batch paradigm to more flexible continuous processing. Here we report the development of a multistep continuous-flow CGMP (current good manufacturing practices) process that produced 24 kilograms of prexasertib monolactate...

While there is a growing literature in the field of gender, sexuality and sport, there is a dearth of research into the lived experiences of transgender people in sport. The present study addresses this research gap by exploring and analysing the accounts of transgender people in relation to their experiences of sport and physical activity. These a...

A practical pilot plant convergent synthesis of MR antagonist LY2623091 was established. For synthesis convergence, a vinyl bromide geometric isomer and chiral alaninol derivative were required building blocks. Key to the synthesis route development is a stereoselective synthesis of the E-vinyl bromide via a sequential double Heck reaction; Suzuki-...

Using the case of Northern Ireland, this article examines how post-conflict transition impacts sports organisations which have traditionally underpinned societal division and what factors facilitate or restrain such organisations from fulfilling peacebuilding functions. The article identifies three peacebuilding functions of sport: in-group sociali...

A single-step method and a two-step method for the synthesis of aminopyrazoles from isoxazoles are presented and compared. Based on in situ NMR monitoring, both processes proceed through a ketonitrile. In the single-step process, hydrazine serves to both open the isoxazole to the unisolated ketonitrile intermediate and form the aminopyrazole. The t...

A fully automated fill/empty reactor system for liquid–liquid biphasic Suzuki couplings is described. The system was capable of charging reactant and catalyst solutions to a heated vessel, heating reagent solutions by flow heat exchanger on the way into the reactor, allowing the reaction to occur, monitoring reaction completion, discharge of the pr...

The right to practice religion is recognised as one of the universal liberties transitional justice interventions are designed to defend, and religion is often mentioned as one of the cultural factors that impact on local transitional justice practices from below. Many human rights cases of abuse, however, are motivated by religious extremism and t...

This Report details the findings from a major Government-funded 3-year research study into social exclusion and sport in Northern Ireland. Engagement in sport has been shown to produce a range of benefits at the individual, community and societal levels. These include inter alia, better mental and physical health, increased self-esteem, enhanced pe...

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Religion and the Northern Ireland Conflict The Personal Faith of Ex-combatants Religion and Motivations for Violence Religion and Prison Ex-combatants and the Churches Perspectives on the Past: Religion in the Personal and the Political Conclusion Religion and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland Bibliograp...

All societies emerging from prolonged and bitter communal conflict face problems around post-violence adjustments at the interpersonal and societal levels. Communal violence leaves a legacy — both for the perpetrators and the victims, for the individual and for society The potential relevance of religion is apparent immediately, for religion offers...

We have described ours as a study that seeks to capture in ex-combatants’ own words the narratives that account for their personal transformation from armed struggle to peace and to assess the mediating role of religion in this journey. We take religion to mean in this context both the level of personal faith and religiosity, which some admitted st...

In Chapter 1 we saw how religion retains a special social and cultural importance in Northern Ireland. Religion is entwined in both of the two dominant nationalisms, churchgoing is high, and most people continue to have some contact with religious rituals and organisations. It is a society in which ancient religious differences endure through proce...

The institutional churches are implicated in communal division in Ireland (see Brewer et al., 2011), for while they never directly supported violence in the modern period, they did little to dismantle the structures of sectarianism in which it was embedded. The institutional church acted as a repository of ethnically exclusive memory; it was associ...

Personal faith and belief are the primary indicators of religious commitment and are the obvious ways in which to assess the role religion has played in mediating decisions over time concerning the choice between armed struggle, non-violence, and peace. But the role religion plays in Northern Ireland as a means of identity construction gives it an...

This chapter looks at the personal religiosity of ex-combatants. First, we explore what the literature has to say about religious belief within combatant groups. We then turn to our interviewees, introducing key belief groups — atheist, devout, and converts — within our sample and exploring respondents’ perspectives within each group. Matters dealt...

Republican ex-combatants attest that, during ‘the Troubles’, recruits to the IRA were warned that in all likelihood their militant activism would lead them to one of two places: the cemetery or jail. Loyalists understood this too, coming to see themselves as the cannon fodder doing the dying or the jail time for others who were whipping up the fren...

The problem of how to deal with weapons held by paramilitary groups looms large over recent Northern Irish history. It delayed power-sharing for nine years after the 1998 Agreement and contributed to seismic change in the political landscape, but existing research has failed to adequately account for decommissioning's massive political impact. This...

How might Hamas be influenced to embark on the same path toward democratic, nonviolent politics that Irish republicanism has trod? This question has been at the heart of recent debates on the relevance of the Northern Irish experience of peacemaking for other seemingly intractable ethnonational conflicts. The inclusion of Sinn F́ein, the political...

This article examines the role of ‘constructive ambiguity’ in the 1998 Belfast Agreement and in its implementation, and demonstrates how it offers a particularly illuminating lens for analysing the persistence and then conclusion of political instability during the years 1998–2007. It begins with a description of what constructive ambiguity is and...