Distinguished scholars, criminal justice practitioners, and former senior officials of international missions examine the experiences of countries that have recently undergone transitions from conflict with significant international involvement.

"In Constructing Justice and Security after War, the distinguished contributors - including scholars, criminal justice practitioners, and former senior officials of international missions - examine the experiences of countries that have recently undergone transitions from conflict with significant international involvement. The volume offers generalizations based on careful comparisons of justice and security reforms in some of the most prominent and successful cases of transitions from war of the 1990s drawn from Central America, Africa, the Balkans, and East Timor."--BOOK JACKET.

The major peacekeeping and stability operations of the last ten years have mostly taken place in countries that have pervasive customary justice systems, which pose significant challenges and opportunities for efforts to reestablish the rule of law. These systems are the primary, if not sole, means of dispute resolution for the majority of the population, but post-conflict practitioners and policymakers often focus primarily on constructing formal justice institutions in the Western image, as opposed to engaging existing traditional mechanisms. This book offers insight into how the rule of law community might make the leap beyond rhetorical recognition of customary justice toward a practical approach that incorporates the realities of its role in justice strategies."Customary Justice and the Rule of Law in War-Torn Societies" presents seven in-depth case studies that take a broad interdisciplinary approach to the study of the justice system. Moving beyond the narrow lens of legal analysis, the cases Mozambique, Guatemala, East Timor, Afghanistan, Liberia, Iraq, Sudan examine the larger historical, political, and social factors that shape the character and role of customary justice systems and their place in the overall justice sector. Written by resident experts, the case studies provide advice to rule of law practitioners on how to engage with customary law and suggest concrete ways policymakers can bridge the divide between formal and customary systems in both the short and long terms. Instead of focusing exclusively on ideal legal forms of regulation and integration, this study suggests a holistic and flexible palette of reform options that offers realistic improvements in light of social realities and capacity limitations. The volume highlights how customary justice systems contribute to, or detract from, stability in the immediate post-conflict period and offers an analytical framework for assessing customary justice systems that can be applied in any country. "

This book seeks to refine our understanding of transitional justice and peacebuilding, and long-term security and reintegration challenges after violent conflicts. As recent events following political change during the so-called 'Arab Spring' demonstrate, demands for accountability often follow or attend conflict and political transition. While traditionally much literature and many practitioners highlighted tensions between peacebuilding and justice, recent research and practice demonstrates a turn away from the supposed 'peace vs justice' dilemma. This volume examines the complex relationship between peacebuilding and transitional justice through the lenses of the increased emphasis on victim-centred approaches to justice and the widespread practices of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of excombatants. While recent volumes have sought to address either DDR or victim-centred approaches to justice, none has sought to make connections between the two, much less to place them in the larger context of the increasing linkages between transitional justice and peacebuilding. This book will be of great interest to students of transitional justice, peacebuilding, human rights, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

This edited volume examines a range of historical and contemporary episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation in the aftermath of war. Reconciliation is a concept that resists easy definition. At the same time, it is almost invariably invoked as a goal of post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding and transitional justice. This book examines the considerable ambiguity and controversy surrounding the term and, crucially, asks what has reconciliation entailed historically? What can we learn from past episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation? Taken together, the chapters in this volume adopt an interdisciplinary approach, focused on the question of how reconciliation has been enacted, performed and understood in particular historical episodes, and how that might contribute to our understanding of the concept and its practice. Rather than seek a universal definition, the book focuses on what makes each case of reconciliation unique, and highlights the specificity of reconciliation in individual contexts. This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, conflict resolution, human rights, history and International Relations.

In the late twentieth century many writers and activists envisioned new possibilities of transnational cooperation toward peace and global justice. In this book Iris Marion Young aims to revive such hopes by responding clearly to what are seen as the global challenges of the modern day. Inspired by claims of indigenous peoples, the book develops a concept of self-determination compatible with stronger institutions of global regulation. It theorizes new directions for thinking about federated relationships between peoples which assume that they need not be large or symmetrical. Young argues that the use of armed force to respond to oppression should be rare, genuinely multilateral, and follow a model of law enforcement more than war. She finds that neither cosmopolitan nor nationalist responses to questions of global justice are adequate and so offers a distinctive conception of responsibility, founded on participation in social structures, to describe the obligations that both individuals and organizations have in a world of global interdependence. Young applies clear analysis and cogent moral arguments to concrete cases, including the wars against Serbia and Iraq, the meaning of the US Patriot Act, the conflict in Palestine/Israel, and working conditions in sweat shops.

The widespread practice of intervention by outside actors aimed at building ‘sustainable peace within societies ravaged by war has been a striking feature of the post-Cold War era. But, at a time when more peacekeepers are deployed around the world than at any other point in history, is the international will to intervene beginning to wane? And how capable are the systems that exist for planning and deployingpeacebuilding missions of fulfilling the increasingly complex tasks set for them? In Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal addresses these and other crucial questions, examining the record of interventions from Cambodia in the early 1990s to contemporary efforts in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book analyses the nature of the modern peacebuilding environment, in particular the historical and psychological conditions that shape it, and addresses the key tasks faced by outside forces in the early and criticalpost-conflict phase of an intervention. In doing so, it asks searching questions about the role of military force in support of peacebuilding, and the vital importance of legitimacy to any intervention. Berdal also looks critically at the ways in which governments and international organisations, particularly the UN, have responded to these many challenges. He highlights the pivotal role of politics in planning peacebuilding operations, and offers some sober reflections on the future prospects for post-conflict intervention.

"This book explores the political dilemmas around security forces in war-torn countries. Well-governed military and police forces are central to sustained peace after civil war, and efforts to restructure security forces are major components of peacebuilding and stabilization efforts. As international actors have attempted to strengthen oversight and curb abuse, however, they have run into thorny political obstacles. Varied outcomes have raised questions about the value of international assistance for strengthening state institutions"--

Support for security and justice institutions has become a crucial instrument of international engagement in fragile and conflict-affected states. In attempts to shore up security as a precondition for sustainable peace, international actors have become deeply engaged in reforming the security agencies and security governance institutions of states emerging from conflict. But despite their increasing importance in the field of international peace- and state-building, security sector reform (SSR) interventions remain both highly political and deeply contentious processes. Expanding on this theme, this edited volume identifies new directions in research on the domestic consequences of external support to security sector reform. Both empirically and theoretically, the focus lies on the so far neglected role of domestic actors, interests and political power constellations in recipient states. Based on a wide range of empirical cases, the volume discusses how the often conflictual and asymmetric encounters between external and domestic actors with divergent interests and perceptions affect the consequences of international interventions. By taking into account the plurality of state and non-state security actors and institutions beyond classical models of Weberian statehood, the contributions make the case for engaging more closely with the complexity of the domestic security governance configurations that can result from external engagement in the field of security sector reform. This book was published as a special issue of International Peacekeeping.