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Abstract
During the Cold War, external aid was a significant component of East-West rivalries with each side influencing their allies through economic support and resources. With the new World Order and increase in the number of protracted intra-state conflicts, external aid was increasingly considered as integral to peacebuilding. Peacebuilding, a term popularised in the 1990s, went beyond the dominant model of managing conflicts and instead focused on addressing their root causes. The changing pattern of conflicts required the international community to focus on new intervention strategies to end violent conflicts based on negotiated agreements, leading to a peace process and followed by peacebuilding strategies to transform them. A peace process can be considered as a mechanism or a set of processes whereby the parties involved attempt to avoid destructive conflict by using different techniques such as diplomacy, mediation and negotiation. Defining the concept, Saunders argues that a peace process is more than conventional diplomacy and negotiation. It encompasses a full range of political, psychological, economic, diplomatic and military actions woven together into a comprehensive effort to establish peace. The term ‘peace dividend’ has been broadly defined as social, political and psychological benefits that accrue as an outcome of a peace process. From this view, external aid is channelled into peace dividends to transform a conflict by social and economic development and therefore a significant component of peacebuilding. It is also hoped that economic growth and prosperity can create incentives on the ground by convincing people that they are stakeholders in the peace process, thereby increasing public support.
... It provided opportunities for new ideas to be tested, pilot projects trialled and further specializations and training to emerge from within the local peacebuilding field. It has also led to the perception that there is now a peace or reconciliation industry (Atashi, 2011;Eyben et al., 2000;Power, 2011), with an expectation of creating external and quantifiable outcomes that require evaluation and assessment. Some might argue that although a considerable amount of work has been made possible by external funding, professionalization of peace has occurred in Northern Ireland at a price. ...
This article seeks to explore why, after significant financial investment and a history of nearly 50 years of civil society activity, there is a paucity of explicitly codified and consolidated indigenous theory that has emerged from peacebuilding practice in Northern Ireland. Methodologically, this apparent contradiction is explored, utilizing both empirical research (interviews with key peacebuilders) and the wide practitioner experience of the authors. It is argued that two complex dynamics have contributed to the subordination of local practice-based knowledge, namely, the professionalization of peace and the dominance of research over practice within academia. These two dynamics have played a mutually exacerbatory and significant role in creating barriers to constructing local peacebuilding theory. Phronesis, an Aristotelian term for practical knowledge, is explored to discover what insights it may contribute to both research, theory and practice in the field of peacebuilding, followed by examples of institutions demonstrating its value for practice–theory reflexivity. The article concludes with a call for peace research that validates and values practical knowledge. By doing so, the authors argue, new avenues for collab-orative partnership between practitioners and academics can open up, which may play a constructive role in bridging practice–theory divides and, most importantly, contribute to building more effective and sustainable peacebuilding processes in Northern Ireland and in other conflict contexts.
A recent report has suggested that the peace process in Northern Ireland has focused on “peace without reconciliation”. This suggests that peacebuilding activities have failed to improve community relations. How can this be, when significant programmes have been incessantly developed since the 1980s? This article offers to look back at the events that took place in the 1969-1979 period and argues that they help understand this state of affairs.
In Afghanistan, there has been much talk about, and international support for dealing with past injustices by developing transitional justice mechanisms. Reconciliation is being promoted as a nation-building strategy. This article argues that the implementation of transitional justice poses several challenges. First, a significant component of such a strategy is based on reconciliation taking place internally among competing armed groups and ethnic identities with the goal of transforming Afghan society. This assumes the cause of past conflicts to be internal and along ethnic divisions which limits the accountability for war crimes. It also considers violence and crimes of war as a thing of the past, ignoring the present situation. Furthermore, given the ongoing war between the US-led forces and the Taliban, insecurity and escalating levels of violence one has to question whether transitional justice can take place during a war. This article concludes that transitional justice is interconnected to perceptions of security and stability. The analysis of the present situation in Afghanistan poses critical questions as to whether memories of victims can be considered as the past in the midst of war.
Former members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and organizers of peaceful civil rights organizations were interviewed to assess how these individuals interpreted the current social conditions in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Contrary to the intercommunity ideals of the Good Friday Agreement, our results suggest that people continue to exist in a society where political power is based on the division of communities, where ordinary people are not motivated to contribute to politics and where everyday life is fundamentally affected by the agreements of strongly opposed politicians. Analysis of transcripts revealed that people lived in a climate that presented violence as inappropriate yet effective. To that end, members of the community were negotiating a period of social psychological conflict and were described as living in a situation of unease rather than peace. Participants warned that conditions appear to be creating tensions that could lead to future violence.
The installation of a new power-sharing government in Northern Ireland in May 2007 was widely welcomed as bringing to an end almost 40 years of intercommunal conflict, and as filling a long-standing political vacuum with a set of new democratic institutions. This article explores the nature of the problem that the new institutions were designed to tackle, outlines the complex blueprint (the Good Friday agreement of 1998) that was designed in response, and assesses the capacity of this constitutional master plan to offer political stability, to prevent a return to paramilitary violence, and to provide a stable channel of expression for the political aspirations of the two communities.
