Peacebuilding Paradigms focuses on how seven paradigms from the Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Policy Analysis subfields - Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Cosmopolitanism, Critical Theories, Locality, and Policy - analyze peacebuilding. The contributors explore the arguments of each paradigm, and then compare and contrast them. This book suggests that a hybrid approach that incorporates useful insights from each of these paradigms best explains how and why peacebuilding projects and policies succeed in some cases, fail in others, and provide lessons learned. Rather than merely using a theoretical approach, the authors use case studies to demonstrate why a focus on just one paradigm alone as an explanatory model is insufficient. This collection directly at how peacebuilding theory affects peacebuilding policies, and provides recommendations for best practices for future peacebuilding missions.
Peacebuilding Paradigms focuses on how seven paradigms from the Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Policy Analysis subfields - Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Cosmopolitanism, Critical Theories, Locality, and Policy - analyze peacebuilding. The contributors explore the arguments of each paradigm, and then compare and contrast them. This book suggests that a hybrid approach that incorporates useful insights from each of these paradigms best explains how and why peacebuilding projects and policies succeed in some cases, fail in others, and provide lessons learned. Rather than merely using a theoretical approach, the authors use case studies to demonstrate why a focus on just one paradigm alone as an explanatory model is insufficient. This collection directly at how peacebuilding theory affects peacebuilding policies, and provides recommendations for best practices for future peacebuilding missions.
"This book examines the political and legal challenges of regional governance in the European Union and the Council of Europe. Academics and policy makers will learn from its analysis of legal and political efforts to integrate supranational and intergovernmental agencies with national political systems"--
"Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have emerged as crucial actors in peacebuilding processes in post-conflict zones, contributing to the liberal state building project. NGOs, like any other organizations, have certain strengths and weaknesses, and face tradeoffs and contradictions in peacebuilding. Given increasing NGO experience in peacemaking and peacebuilding, this volume examines their relatively positive record, as well as the constraints, limitations, and sometimes contradictory impact of their activities and interventions."--Provided by publisher.
This book presents a cost-benefit analysis of torture, daring to ask if the use of torture is ever justified or always ill-advised. While the use of torture is variously presented either as an aberrant American weapon unleashed in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11 or as a necessary tool in the War on Terror, torture has a long history across cultures. Yet, the debate over the morality, and the legality, of the brutal practice flourishes. This volume presents a new angle in the study of this controversial practice, approaching the issue of torture from a cost-benefit analysis for the practicing nation, rather than from a sensationalist, emotive vantage point. Adopting a transnational approach, the author examines the use of torture by the French in Algeria, the Argentines within their own borders, the Israelis in the Middle East, and the Americans in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In attempting to define torture, he asks: Is the information gained through torture worth the potential damage? What is the harm (or benefit) to the state once the torture becomes known? What are the political and strategic ramifications? Does torture help win wars? Can the use of torture bring about any lasting or beneficial reforms? These are daring questions seldom pondered. In asking them, this book will help to foster a discussion that is long overdue.
The Special Rapporteur for Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation is a norm entrepreneur, both as a norm monitor and clarifier, as well as an advocate for reparative action for victims. Two incumbents have identified fundamental principles of these two human rights and many implementation requirements for their protection. Appropriate attention has been placed on various vulnerable groups that require greater efforts at norm compliance through policy responses. However, many countries have tremendous inequalities in access to water and sanitation, which are largely unacknowledged and even unnoticed, for which states have a positive responsibility, but which are not easily noticed because of weak civil society monitoring. Both mandate holders have much of their efforts on country visits with governments interested in improvement—which is desirable for both the countries concerned and for the development of rubrics for institutionalized lessons learned, best practices and methodologies for information collection and analysis. Considerable efforts have also been made on norm development that hopefully encourages emulation. More emphasis is needed to identify and clarify legally-binding, hard law requirements in implementation, not just soft-law non-legally binding recommendations to governments and their public and private partners, as well as specifying the binding rights of the vulnerable. Also needed are more cataloguing of government violations of the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, especially outside of Latin America, from where the two mandate holders come. Particular attention should be paid to countries that refuse country visits. Greater use of reliable information concerning pollution of drinking water, poor sanitation, economic development without consultation or impact analysis, exorbitant pricing of water, and inadequate sanitation that allows public defecation. This office should also coordinate generally more often with other Special Procedures on many inter-sectional issues, but above all else, on climate change issues, which present an existential threat to rights protection. While there are many competing claims for resources, important issues regarding access to safe drinking water and sanitation go unnoticed by this office because of its insufficient attention to early warning and urgent action procedures for these violations. However, the contributions of the two mandate holders to norm development has been clear, effective and deserving of praise.
In: Political science quarterly: a nonpartisan journal devoted to the study and analysis of government, politics and international affairs ; PSQ, Band 122, Heft 2, S. 355-357