Marie-Joelle Zahar

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Political Science

International Law and Peace Settlements provides a systematic and comprehensive assessment of the relationship between international law and peace settlement practice across core settlement issues, e.g. transitional justice, human rights, refugees, self-determination, power-sharing, and wealth-sharing. The contributions address key cross-cutting qu...

This article argues that inclusion is a key driver of resilient social contracts and a foundation for sustaining peace. Drawing on case studies conducted under the Forging Resilient Social Contracts project and building on the literature on transitions from war to peace and authoritarianism to democracy, the theoretical framework links inclusion to...

This chapter examines the impact of territorial restructuring in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the context in which it took place. It first considers the context that accompanied the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before discussing the period of constitutional engagement in the BiH. In particular, it highlights two major...

In The Political Economy of Regional Peacemaking, scholars examine the efficacy of trade agreements, economic sanctions, and other strategies of economic statecraft for the promotion of peace both between rival states and across conflict-ridden regions more generally. In the introduction, Steven E. Lobell and Norrin M. Ripsman pose five central que...

The notion of negative resilience is Lebanon’s foremost contribution to the study of social cohesion in deeply divided societies. Aoun and Zahar's analysis of the Lebanon case illustrates the manner in which the confessional system of consociational governance deeply constrains donors’ efforts to foster cross-cutting social engagement, and to recon...

While all Lebanese hail from a common descent, contending visions of Lebanon have resulted in communally based ?ethnic divisions? that contribute to the country's political instability and to recurring civil wars. Because the Palestinian question deepened the fault lines between Lebanon's Christian and Muslim communities, the treatment of Palestini...

Social cohesion has increasingly been touted as a tool of peacebuilding. Theoretically, the concept is linked with efforts to address inequality and build social capital. Practically, social cohesion is bandied about in settings such as the Central African Republic (CAR) as an important objective for building sustainable peace. We argue that peaceb...

This article addresses three shortcomings in the path dependency literature on critical junctures: the neglect of negative cases, non-state actors and of power asymmetries. The 2005 Cedar Revolution had the makings of a critical juncture. Yet despite the rise of alternative non-governmental organizations (ANGOs) seeking to change the sectarian poli...

This article examines the transmission and reception of democratic norms in the context of liberal peace interventions. It identifies two reasons for the failure to promote democracy: the strategies favored by liberal peace actors and the agency of local elites. Drawing on field research in Lebanon and Sudan, the article argues that liberal peace p...

Drawing upon the authors' experience and work with the Francophone Research Network on Peace Operations in Montreal, developing and implementing peacekeeping capacity-building projects for French-speaking countries in bilateral and multilateral contexts, this article critically explores the intersection of peace operations and the francophone space...

This chapter focuses on the violence committed by ethnic nonstate armed groups (NSAGs). It develops an argument about the conditions under which mediators can successfully devise winning strategies to bring identity conflicts involving NSAGs to an end. In contrast to the literature that describes ethnic NSAGs as spoilers, the author contends that i...

South Sudan will officially become independent on July 9, 2011. When southern Sudanese voted in the January 9 referendum on independence, they sought to affirm their African identity and shed the Arab identity that they felt had been imposed upon them by successive regimes in Khartoum. South Sudan's internal violence is often described as tribal. M...

In transitions from war to peace, mediators and other foreign interveners identify "spoilers" as one of the main threats to peace processes. Profiling would-be spoilers and developing appropriate typologies to prevent them from using violence has become prevailing wisdom at the United Nations and beyond. This article argues that the spoiler typolog...

The purpose of international conflict-resolution efforts is, in the short term, to bring an end to violent armed conflict, and, in the medium to longer term, to prevent the revival of conflict. However, at least one of the mechanisms often utilised in conflict resolution and peace agreements, power-sharing, may not only prove problematic in early n...

This article analyses how alternative power-sharing mechanisms can be used to secure peace in countries where warring parties fail to reach a traditional power-sharing agreement, the most common method of solving the 'credible commitment' problem. By examining the cases of Angola and Mozambique, it demonstrates how 'soft' guarantees — in these case...

Why do some peace agreements end civil conflict while others break down? Empirical evidence underscores the importance of sustainability: the Rwandan genocide succeeded the 1992 Arusha peace agreement; likewise, some of the worst violence in Angola, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia (among others) followed the breakdown of peace accords.

The paper offers a critique of power-sharing arrangements as instruments able to sustain peace in deeply divided societies and as the foundations for a stable process of state (re-)building. The success of power sharing – defined as the achievement of a stable endogenously-driven process of state-building – in a post-conflict environment is at best...

Special issue of Théologiques, vol. 16., no. 2.

110 p.

The Dangers of Nation-Building under “Influence”: The Cases of Iraq and Lebanon The literature on nation building has, to date, been UNcentric. However, increasingly, regional and global powers step in unilaterally or as part of coalitions to remove authoritarian leaders or end drawn out civil wars. These “interested” powers spearhead nation-buildi...

Lebanon provides a good opportunity to consider both the characteristics and trajectories of the concept of state-within-states. It is a country that has been described as “extremely plural”;2 it is a country whose state has always been “weak,” debilitated by a confessional power-sharing agreement that has periodically kept the peace but which has...

When do militias---whose power, riches, and legitimacy depend on the continuation of civil wars---accept negotiated settlements? An unexplored and crucial dimension of militia decision-making is the process of militia institutionalization. Militias create institutions to improve their odds of winning the war and project legitimacy internally as wel...

Since the early 1990s, countries coming out of civil wars are the theatre of peace building and post-conflict reconstruction missions. Unlike traditional peacekeeping missions, these are operations where foreign military troops are used by outsiders to “control political outcomes.” The objectives are often laudable, “to create stable, tolerant, mor...