Search results

Making War and Building Peace examines how well United Nations peacekeeping missions work after civil war. Statistically analyzing all civil wars since 1945, the book compares peace processes that had UN involvement to those that didn't. Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis argue that each mission must be designed to fit the conflict, with the right authority and adequate resources. UN missions can be effective by supporting new actors committed to the peace, building governing institutions, and monitoring and policing implementation of peace settlements. But the UN is not good at intervening in ongoing wars. If the conflict is controlled by spoilers or if the parties are not ready to make peace, the UN cannot play an effective enforcement role. It can, however, offer its technical expertise in multidimensional peacekeeping operations that follow enforcement missions undertaken by states or regional organizations such as NATO. Finding that UN missions are most effective in the first few years after the end of war, and that economic development is the best way to decrease the risk of new fighting in the long run, the authors also argue that the UN's role in launching development projects after civil war should be expanded. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1259/thumbnail.jpg

This article discusses the way in which the national celebration of peace, held in the summer of 1919, was manifested locally. It begins by pointing out that 1919 itself was a year of major tensions and political dangers, and that in some places the celebrations themselves saw scenes of violence and rioting. Although peace celebrations were intended as, and usually portrayed as, a focus for national and local unity and harmony, the reality was more complex and they could 'unmask conflicting perspectives and values in communities up and down Britain'. The bulk of the article looks at the experience of Lancashire, and Michael Hughes observes that it 'is striking, and in some ways surprising, that most disorders . occurred in such places as Luton and Coventry rather than in the older industrial settlements of the north of England' with their tradition of radical politics.Extensive use is made of newspaper reporting of the Armistice, its aftermath, and the peace celebrations themselves, with close attention to the often wide discrepancies between what the government was proposing and what was acceptable to local authorities in Lancashire. A particular source of disagreement was the question of expenditure, with some councils taking the initiative, setting up special committees to plan and manage events, and voting significant sums for the funding of celebrations, but others being condemned for not spending enough. There were arguments about whether the money would be better spent on, for example, demobilised and disabled soldiers, a conflict illustrated by a vocal and passionate disagreement in the borough of Haslingden.The article shows how the celebrations took different forms in different places – for example, whether there was a military parade or a war veterans' parade as the centrepiece – and how in some places, such as Manchester and Liverpool, the mood was notably subdued in comparison with the joy which had greeted the November armistice. In contrast, in Bacup, St Annes and Clitheroe, among others, there ...

This dissertation investigates the relationship between peace interventions and people's experience of peace, in order to contribute to better and evidence-based peacebuilding practice. In the peace and conflict studies field, we still do not fully understand why states, groups, and individuals engage in acts of violence, nor of the interventions that could transform this tendency. The emerging theory of 'infrastructures for peace' suggests that violence can be prevented, and peace supported, with infrastructures for peace. The concept –the institutions, mechanisms, resources, and skills through which conflicts are resolved and peace is sustained within a society– has been adopted as a policy framework by the United Nations and the governments of Kenya and Ghana. Using mixed methods, including interviews with over 1,600 respondents in Nepal, I explore how infrastructures for peace work and what their relation is to peacebuilding priorities in Nepal. Findings show that, looking through the lens of infrastructures for peace, a web of relationships that constitutes a country's peace system becomes visible, including gaps and overlaps in services. This makes it possible to identify peacebuilding priorities on the basis of (1) the peace needs of the population, (2) people's own peace services preferences, and (3) the peace needs and services that are associated with less violence and more peace. This dissertation contributes to the theoretical and empirical debates on peace infrastructures, the state of peace in Nepal, and the effectiveness of peacebuilding interventions. It also provides a method to investigate everyday peace and peace infrastructures in a systematic and quantitative way. Finally, this dissertation contributes to the policy debate by offering the possibility of applying the model in other countries; making concrete recommendations for decision-makers and peace workers; and providing national and district estimates of conflict, violence and peace, as well as entry points for peacebuilding in Nepal.

It is intuitive to view peace and war as inherently opposite categories. Peace is routinely defined as the freedom from organised collective violence, or as the 'absence of war'. Conversely, war is generally conceived either in Clausewitzian terms as organised violence to achieve political ends or as a moral or legal condition defining the permissible limits of organised violence. And yet, one of the founding tenets of contemporary peace and conflict studies has been to reject this binary 'negative' concept of peace as merely the 'absence of war' by asserting a positive concept of peace that refers to consensual values and the 'integration of human society'. The enduring aspiration of how to achieve peace can be summed up with the phrase 'peace through peaceful means'. While the field has remained normatively grounded on sustaining a prohibition on the resort to violence—peace through peaceful means—it has also grappled with questions of how, how much or in what way, military force ought to be deployed in contemporary challenges such as humanitarian interventions, complex emergencies and stabilising postconflict societies. Strategic and security studies have also been grappling with a widening (issues) and deepening (agency) security agenda which has opened up questions about the utility of force to respond to so-called non-conventional threats and in responding to non-state actors. Both fields of scholarship have utilised the concept of hybridity in their efforts to understand the blurred lines between peace, war and across a range of challenges in contemporary world politics.