Suchergebnisse

AbstractToday we live in a world where the majority of wars are no longer interstate, a development that over the last few decades has often left the international community, in particular the United Nations as it was originally conceived, ill equipped to respond. The nimble action required for contemporary conflict resolution and peacebuilding now primarily lies in the hands of local actors and states, sometimes supported by international actors. But it is not always clear who these local actors are or what they need in order to achieve sustainable peace. As part of the roundtable "World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It)," this essay looks in more detail at what we mean by "local" in conflict-affected contexts and asks how local is local enough when resolving conflicts and building peace. It identifies tensions and concerns such as the need for the international community to have a well-defined and easily identified "local agenda" when, in reality, there are often several competing local agendas. The essay presents the Everyday Peace Indicators project as a vehicle that can be used to help communicate these local needs to international actors, and argues for the importance of understanding people's perceived realities in addition to, if not more than, their actual realities when trying to understand peace and conflict trends. In order to do this, we need to more effectively problematize peacebuilding for positive conflict disruption.

Is peace more likely to prevail when the peace accord includes civil society actors such as religious groups, women's organizations, and human rights groups? This is the first statistical study that explores this issue. The article develops key claims in previous research regarding the role of civil society actors and durable peace, and proposes a set of hypotheses that focus on legitimacy in this process. The hypotheses are examined by employing unique data on the inclusion of civil society actors in all peace agreements in the post-Cold War period. The statistical analysis shows that inclusion of civil society actors in the peace settlement increases the durability of peace. The results further demonstrate that peace accords with involvement from civil society actors and political parties in combination are more likely to see peace prevail. The findings also suggest that inclusion of civil society has a particularly profound effect on the prospects for overall peace in nondemocratic societies. (International Interactions/FUB)

Peace is not an absence, but rather a visibly identifiable set of norms. This visualization can take place through internationally recognized signs such as the white flag and the blue helmet. These representations of norms are united in their ability to be distinguished from similar objects or signs through their use of colors. The identificatory use of color avoids confusion between parties embroiled in a conflict, making an organization or envoy stand out and creat- ing the expectation that they are encompassed by the specific norms of war- fare, which these colors make visible. Through establishing such "dumb signs" of peace, as Grotius put it, the colors of peace have, we argue, played a notable part in establishing customary international law. The aim of our con- tribution is to offer an illustrative chromatological analysis of how peace and its norms are made visible through objects and symbols which are not con- nected with peace beyond their coloring (e.g., emblems, flags, helmets, or war- zone vehicles). We show how certain colors, in their situated use, come to both symbolize and enact peace in terms of international politics.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Ambiguities in Local and Global Contexts -- Part I: Complexity and Ambiguity -- Chapter 2: Approaching Complexity in Peace and Conflict -- Chapter 3: Tolerance of Ambiguity -- Part II: New Photographies and Visual Ambiguities -- Chapter 4: The Crisis of Photojournalism and the Emergence of New Photographies -- Chapter 5: Visual Ambiguities: Controlling the Meaning of Images in a Digital and Interactive World -- Part III: Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace -- Chapter 6: Introducing Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace -- Chapter 7: Navigating Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace -- Chapter 8: The Grids: Architectural Space and Panel-to-Panel Transitions -- Chapter 9: Interactivity and the Author-Audience Relationship -- Part IV: Leveraging Ambiguity for Peace -- Chapter 10: Embracing Difference: Learning from Bosnia? -- Chapter 11: Exploring the Surround, Appreciating Complexity -- Chapter 12: Active Looking: Images in Peace Mediation -- Chapter 13: Concluding Reflections: Tolerance of Ambiguity and the Ambiguity of Tolerance.

Under what conditions do religious groups engage in peace activism? Religious groups engage in peace activism if the associated costs are low and they compete with either conflict party over the interpretation of their religious content concerning war and peace. Peace activism is a promising action as peace activists maintain their positive self-evaluation. I introduce a novel dataset of peace activism for 511 religious groups in 128 countries from 1990 to 2008. Conditional fixed effects and logistic models support my hypotheses. The findings highlight the role of rational considerations in the decision to conduct peace activities by representatives of religious groups.

Under what conditions do religious groups engage in peace activism? Religious groups engage in peace activism if the associated costs are low and they compete with either conflict party over the interpretation of their religious content concerning war and peace. Peace activism is a promising action as peace activists maintain their positive self-evaluation. I introduce a novel dataset of peace activism for 511 religious groups in 128 countries from 1990 to 2008. Conditional fixed effects and logistic models support my hypotheses. The findings highlight the role of rational considerations in the decision to conduct peace activities by representatives of religious groups.