Suchergebnisse

The concept of civil society has acquired an unprecedented worldwide popularity, especially in development programs. This article investigates the international effort to build civil society in Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to foster peace and democratization, this in response to disappointment with traditional economic, military, and political strategies. The results of this major investment of resources, however, have been unsatisfactory. The international community's lack of a coherent long-term strategy and the adoption of a conception of civil society that is often at odds with Bosnian context and history hinder the transition to genuine reconciliation among the three ethnic groups. Examining two major areas of intervention - facilitating the advocacy role of local civic groups and fostering citizens' participation - I show that the international community has failed to comprehend both the political and the social meaning of its involvement. Although the focus on civil society is meant to overcome the limits of external regulation and to emphasize indigenous and community-based contributions to peacebuilding, the international community's approach is to make local development dependent upon the international presence. The result is a failure to address the structural problems that affect the country and to hinder, rather than foster, the formation of an open and democratic civil society.

A number of consociational power-sharing initiatives are compared to explore some of the reasons why the elite conflict regulation model has not settled the Northern Ireland conflict. In the period 1972-85, four attempts by the British government to formulate and implement a power-sharing government within Northern Ireland failed as a result of the recalcitrance of one or other of the mainstream political parties. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) ended the Unionist veto and included the Irish government in the political process to find a solution. Since 1985, four efforts by both governments to establish a devolved power-sharing government have included previously marginalized political groups in the political process. In this article, I argue that since the 1985 AIA the bilateral external ethnoguarantors - the British and Irish governments - have contained the conflict by using a coercive consociational approach to elite conflict management. Since 1985, four efforts to promote contact between Unionists and Nationalists at all levels and all points show promise in reframing the conflict from resources and interests to identity needs. Such a transformational approach is necessary to open up thinking about conflict and in constructing a multimodal, multilevel contingency approach to peace-building and conflict settlement in Northern Ireland.

In both the general theory of peacebuilding and the specific implementation of peace agreements, the establishment of democratic political processes and institutions is accorded a high priority by external actors in their efforts to stabilize war-torn societies. An emphasis on free elections has been especially insistent in the peacebuilding processes developed for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was a keystone of the 1995 Dayton Agreement. This article focuses on the 1997 municipal elections because they were widely regarded as an important test of peacebuilding assumptions and because they illuminate local differentiation in non-nationalist voting. Our analysis indicates that a higher degree of optimism about the strength of non-nationalist voting may be justified than commentators have detected, especially if it allows for an ideological interpretation of the policies of former communists in Republika Srpska. Non-nationalist voting has varied in relation to the presence of ethnic Bosniacs, the population density and the mix of ethnic types. Generally, however, the municipal elections indicate that casting votes has not been a peacebuilding panacea in terms of the international organizations' strategic goal of building a unitary, self-governing, multi-ethnic state. Instead, the elections have legitimized ethnically purged constituencies and led to a flawed protectorate in which the Office of the UN Secretary-General's High Representative (OHR) and the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) have become increasingly inveigled into attempting to manipulate local politics.

Recently, conflict resolution practitioners and scholars have begun exploring the application and compatibility of theory and practice to different religious and cultural contexts and conflicts. This article is aimed at, first, bridging conflict resolution and intercultural training concepts through the presentation of a training model in interreligious peacebuilding; second, examining the dynamics and participants' responses in an interreligious context to the intercultural sensitivity model, which is used in an intercultural communication training setting. The data and analysis are based on a series of workshops and interviews conducted between 1996 and 1999 with participants from diverse religious backgrounds. The narrative and stories illustrate the dynamics of the proposed training model and its impact on the participants. The analysis indicates that, with the exception of responses to the last two stages, participants in interreligious settings have similar types of responses to the Intercultural Sensitivity Model. Adaptation and integration responses not only did not exist, but were rejected by all participants on the grounds that moral, ethical, and spiritual religious dimensions would often prevent individuals from adopting integration or adaptation responses. Finally, the article proposes several questions and hypotheses to advance the research in this field.