Theorising civil society peacebuilding: the practical wisdom of local peace practitioners in Northern Ireland, 1965-2015

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Information -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Prologue: Episteme, Techne but no Phronesis -- 1 Introduction -- Local Grassroots and Civil Society Peacebuilding: a Neglected Contribution? -- Learning from Applied Practice: Defining the Scope of Research -- Knowledge Wars for Peace? -- The Rediscovery of a Lost 'Virtue' of Knowledge: Practical Wisdom -- Conceptualising Phronesis -- Evidence of Phronesis -- The Structure of the Book -- References -- 2 Whose Knowledge Counts for Peace? -- The Emergence of Peace Research -- Conflict: Management, Resolution, and Transformation -- Protracted Social Conflicts and Identity-Based Conflict Theory -- Lederach and Sustainable Peacebuilding -- Outsider Interveners, Elicitive Approaches, and Local Knowledge -- Strategic, Integrated, and Multi-Tracked Approaches to Peacebuilding -- Levels of Peacebuilding: Grassroots and Civil Society -- Liberal Peace and the Critical Peace School -- Technocratic Peacebuilding and Its Undermining of the 'local' -- Everyday Peace and the Politics of Peacebuilding Knowledge -- Tensions and Debates About Knowledge for Peacebuilding -- Knowledge Debates in Northern Ireland -- Conclusion -- References -- 3 What Kind of Knowledge Matters for Peace? -- The Aristotelian View: Practical Knowledge, a Neglected Virtue? -- Phronesis: Insights From the Professional Practice Literature -- The Dominance of a Technical-Rational Epistemology of Practice -- Navigating the Swampy Lowland -- Phronesis as Judgement of the Particular -- Ways of Knowing: Insights From Feminist Epistemologies -- Links Between Ways of Knowing and Phronesis -- Phronesis as Knowledge of Context-For-Action -- Building a Conceptual Frame for Phronesis.

"Using empirical qualitative research, this book conceptualises and demonstrates the value of local practical knowledge for peacebuilding, in the context of Northern Ireland. There are increasing calls to involve local people to ensure legitimacy, relevance and sustainability when seeking to build peace and transform violent conflict. However, as peacebuilding becomes increasingly professionalised, this raises fundamental questions about whose knowledge matters for building peace and what kind of knowledge matters. Seeking to address these questions and to learn from applied practice, this book provides a qualitative empirical research study, investigating 40 practitioners active in conflict transformation at a grassroots level in Northern Ireland over 50 years. This research led not only to recapturing lost knowledge from practitioners, but also to a neglected 'virtue' - the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom, phronesis. This book argues that phronesis has deepened our understanding of why 'local' practical knowledge is vitally important and calls for its global rediscovery as knowledge necessary for building sustainable peace. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, philosophy, and British and Irish politics"--

Introduction -- Whose knowledge counts for peace? -- What kind of knowledge matters for peace? -- A history of applied phronesis? Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland from 1965-2015 -- Phronesis as an epistemology of practice -- Using phronesis to progress peace -- The phronetic lens: Value added for peace? -- Taking local practice seriously? Implications and conclusions.