scholarly journals In the Streets and at the Table: Civil Society Coordination during Peace Negotiations

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desirée Nilsson ◽  
Isak Svensson ◽  
Barbara Magalhães Teixeira ◽  
Luís Martínez Lorenzo ◽  
Anton Ruus
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Mass Action ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Peace Negotiations ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
Research Gap

Abstract When bringing armed conflicts to a peaceful end, the inclusion of civil society in peacemaking is a vital task. However, whereas previous research on civil society inclusion has made significant advancements, surprisingly little attention has been paid to analyzing how civil resistance and mass action may interact with more elite-driven approaches during peace processes. This study addresses this research gap by examining the interplay between elite and mass-based civil society approaches in three different peace processes in civil wars in Africa in the post-Cold War period: Liberia, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Burundi. We advance the literature by developing a framework that focuses on coordination of these different efforts and we explore this interplay empirically. With this study, we aim to broaden the research agenda, allowing for future synergies at the research frontier of mass action and the inclusion of civil society in peace processes.

scholarly journals Negotiating Sacred Grounds? Resolving Islamist Armed Conflicts

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-388
Author(s):  
Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Research Problem ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Peace Negotiations ◽  
Track Record ◽  
Negotiated Settlements ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Global Agenda

Abstract Under what conditions can Islamist armed conflicts be resolved through peace negotiations? Armed conflicts involving Islamist groups have emerged as one of the most pressing challenges on the global agenda for peace and security. But the track record of conflict resolution in these settings is not encouraging. While armed conflicts have generally decreased in the post-Cold War period, as many prolonged civil wars were resolved through negotiated settlements, this has not been true to the same extent for this sub-category of conflicts. Yet, we know surprisingly little about why this is the case. The purpose of this thematic issue is to address this gap. Each contributor tackles a different angle of the overarching research problem.

Women’s Organizations and Peace Initiatives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aili Mari Tripp
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Regional Organizations ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Peace Movements ◽  
Peace Negotiations ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
Peace Initiatives ◽  
Successes And Challenges

Women’s peace movements in the post–Cold War era frequently share three common characteristics: a grassroots and local focus due to exclusion from formal peace negotiations; an early and sustained commitment to bridging differences between factions; and the use of international and regional pressures to create success on the local level. This chapter reviews each of these characteristics through case studies. Examples from Sri Lanka, Somalia, and Nepal illustrate the successes and challenges of grassroots or local peace movements led by women. Peace processes in Burundi, led by women activists, exemplify a commitment to unity across ethnic lines. The chapter concludes with examples from Liberia and Sierra Leone, demonstrating the efficacy of international and regional organizations supporting local peace movements.

scholarly journals Civil War from a Transnational Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International System ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Post Cold War

Civil war is the dominant form of armed conflict in the contemporary international system, and most severe lethal armed conflicts in the post-Cold War era have been civil/intrastate rather than interstate. Still, it would be misleading to see these conflicts as purely domestic, as many contemporary civil wars such as Syria display clear transnational characteristics, including inspirations from events in other countries, links to actors in other countries, as well as international interventions. Moreover, civil wars often have important implications for other states, including security concerns and economic impacts. There is a need to focus on the growth and core findings in the literature on transnational dimensions of civil war, in particular on how factors outside a particular state can influence the risk of conflict within states as well as some of the central consequences of domestic conflict for other states or relations between states. This line of research has helped expand our understanding of both civil conflict and interstate war, and that a comparative focus on varieties conflict and attention to the possible transnational dimensions of civil war deserve a prominent role in future research.

Civil Wars & the Post–Cold War International Order

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce D. Jones ◽  
Stephen John Stedman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Alternative Assessment ◽  
Previous History ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Order ◽  
Failed States ◽  
Global Crisis ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
And Migration

By the standards of prosperity and peace, the post–Cold War international order has been an unparalleled success. Over the last thirty years, there has been more creation of wealth and a greater reduction of poverty, disease, and food insecurity than in all of previous history. During the same period, the numbers and lethality of wars have decreased. These facts have not deterred an alternative assessment that civil violence, terrorism, failed states, and numbers of refugees are at unprecedentedly high levels. But there is no global crisis of failed states and endemic civil war, no global crisis of refugees and migration, and no global crisis of disorder. Instead, what we have seen is a particular historical crisis unfold in the greater Middle East, which has collapsed order within that region and has fed the biggest threat to international order: populism in the United States and Europe.

Central African Republic: Coups, Mutinies, and Civil War

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Central African Republic ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Political Liberalization ◽  
Fragile State ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The 1960S

Since independence from France in 1960, the Central African Republic (CAR) has experienced numerous military coups both successful and unsuccessful, mutinies by disgruntled soldiers and civil wars that have had terrible impacts on civilians. Three career military officers took power by force and led the country for a total of 36 years: Bokassa (1965–1979), Kolingba (1981–1993), and Bozize (2003–2013). From the 1960s to 1990s, both military and civilian rulers politicized, regionalized, and weakened the CAR military by packing it with supporters from their home areas and ethnic groups, and establishing alternative security structures and bringing in foreign troops to secure their regimes. In this period, the CAR military became a Praetorian force obsessed with the country’s internal political power struggles. In the 1990s, in the context of the post-Cold War political liberalization of Africa, the CAR’s transition to democracy was undermined by a succession of army mutinies over lack of pay and other grievances that fatally weakened an already fragile state. A series of civil wars in the 2000s and 2010s resulted in the near dissolution of the CAR military and the partition of the country into a network of fiefdoms dominated by antagonistic local armed factions separated from each other by beleaguered UN peacekeepers.

A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 557-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLIVER P. RICHMOND
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Double Standards ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Liberal Peace ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Basic Goal ◽  
Hybrid Forms

AbstractThe ‘liberal peace’ is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy at the level of the everyday in post-conflict environments. In many such environments; different groups often locally constituted perceive it to be ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects. It is tied to Western and liberal conceptions of the state, to institutions, and not to the local. Its post-Cold War moral capital, based upon its more emancipatory rather than conservative claims, has been squandered as a result, and its basic goal of a liberal social contract undermined. Certainly, since 9/11, attention has been diverted into other areas and many, perhaps promising peace processes have regressed. This has diverted attention away from a search for refinements, alternatives, for hybrid forms of peace, or for empathetic strategies through which the liberal blueprint for peace might coexist with alternatives. Yet from these strategies a post-liberal peace might emerge via critical research agendas for peacebuilding and for policymaking, termed here, eirenist. This opens up a discussion of an everyday ‘post-liberal peace’ and critical policies for peacebuilding.

The Justice Facade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Hinton
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Khmer Rouge ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Conflict

Is there a point to international justice? This book explores this question in Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge revolutionaries committed genocide and crimes against humanity in an attempt to create a pure socialist regime (1975–1979). Due to geopolitics, it was only in 2006 that a UN-backed hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (“Khmer Rouge Tribunal”), commenced operation, one of a growing number of post-Cold War transitional justice interventions. The Justice Facade argues that there is a point to such tribunals, but it is masked by a set of utopian human rights and democratization ideals. Instead of projecting this transitional justice imaginary onto post-conflict peacebuilding efforts, we need to step behind the justice facade to examine what tribunals mean in terms of everyday life and practices—such as the Buddhist beliefs and ritual interactions with the spirits of the dead that are critical to Cambodian victims and survivors. In making this argument, The Justice Facade focuses on civil society outreach efforts to “translate” the court in terms meaningful to Cambodians, the majority of whom are rural villagers, as well as the experience of Cambodian civil parties who testified. This ground-breaking study of transitional justice and demonstration of the importance of examining “justice in translation” is of critical importance not just to those working in the field of transitional justice and law, but in related fields such as development, human rights, anthropology, and peacebuilding.

America's Wars

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Henriksen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Small Footprint

The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in American global hegemony in world affairs. In the post-Cold War period, both Democrat and Republican governments intervened, fought insurgencies, and changed regimes. In America's Wars, Thomas Henriksen explores how America tried to remake the world by militarily invading a host of nations beset with civil wars, ethnic cleansing, brutal dictators, and devastating humanitarian conditions. The immediate post-Cold War years saw the United States carrying out interventions in the name of Western-style democracy, humanitarianism, and liberal internationalism in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks led America into larger-scale military incursions to defend itself from further assaults by al Qaeda in Afghanistan and from perceived nuclear arms in Iraq, while fighting small-footprint conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Arabia. This era is coming to an end with the resurgence of great power rivalry and rising threats from China and Russia.

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