Political accommodation in Northern Ireland, Israel and South Africa at the macro level may not, by itself, be sufficient to achieve the long-term goals of building peace and reconciliation. This book uses Lederach's peace-building model to explore issues which may provide a basis for transformation and a lasting peace in the three countries.

In places as diverse as South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Nepal, negotiators of national peace plans have for years sanctioned the creation of local peace committees (LPCs) to address community-level sources of grievance and thereby to build peace from the bottom up. In A Crucial Link: Local Peace Committees and National Peacebuilding, longtime practitioner Andries Odendaal engages in the first comparative study of LPCs and asks whether and where the committees have succeeded.

This volume examines the gap between agreements and actual peace. It offers different explanations for the successes and failures of the three processes - in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine - and provides historical and comparative perspectives on the failure of the Middle East peace process.

Since the end of the Cold War several political agreements have been signed in attempts to resolve longstanding conflicts in such volatile regions as Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, South Africa, and Rwanda. This is the first comprehensive volume that examines reconciliation, justice, and coexistence in the post-settlement context from the levels of both theory and practice. Mohammed Abu-Nimer has brought together scholars and practitioners who discuss questions such as: Do truth commissions work? What are the necessary conditions for reconciliation? Can political agreements bring reconciliation? How can indigenous approaches be utilized in the process of reconciliation? In addition to enhancing the developing field of peacebuilding by engaging new research questions, this book will give lessons and insights to policy makers and anyone interested in post-settlement issues.

A noted conflict-resolution expert explores dignity, its role in human conflict, and its power to improve relationships Drawing on her extensive experience in international conflict resolution and on insights from evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience, Donna Hicks explains what the elements of dignity are, how to recognize dignity violations, how to respond when we are not treated with dignity, how dignity can restore a broken relationship, why leaders must understand the concept of dignity, and more. By choosing dignity as a way of life, Hicks shows, we open the way to greater peace within ourselves and to a safer and more humane world for all. For the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Dignity, Hicks has written a new preface that reflects on her experience helping communities and individuals understand the power of dignity and how it can lead to a more peaceful world. "Anyone who understands the importance of personal feelings and their fuel for conflict should consider Dignity as a powerful advisory and motivational guide."--Midwest Book Review Winner of the 2012 Educator's Award, given by the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International.

Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.

Sport is a cultural institution that stands at the interface between political and civil society. In divided communities, sport has been an agent of separation, sectarian hatred and violence, but also a highly effective tool for conflict resolution, reconciliation and peace-building. In this important study, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson draw on their extensive international experience of working with divided communities to develop a methodological and theoretical model for peace-building in sport. The book showcases original case studies from three regions of the world in which sport has played a prominent role in social deconstruction and reconstruction: Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and South Africa. Combining a wealth of primary and secondary data, the authors chart the rise of the contemporary Sport for Development and Peace movement (SDP) and outline an important new practice-based framework for understanding, researching and working to achieve positive social change in the SDP sector. This is essential reading for any student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in the sociology of sport, sport development, international development, peace studies or conflict resolution.

This book considers how the social construction of crime and the criminalising of political expression impact upon different stages in a violent political conflict. The freedom to express our political opinions is regarded as an essential human right throughout most of the world, and yet, in defence of our security, governments often place various restrictions on it. This book directly considers what these restrictions are in the context of deeply divided societies to understand how they impact upon intergroup relations in four different contexts: nonviolent movements, counter-insurgency, peace negotiations, and post-settlement peacebuilding. Drawing on an extensive body of original interviews and archival material, the volume analyses this relationship through an in-depth consideration of Northern Ireland and South Africa, followed by a wider analysis of Turkey, Sri Lanka, Belgium, and Canada. The overarching argument is that the implications of criminalising political expression depend on both its ‘target’ and the wider social reality it contributes towards. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, transitional justice, law, and International Relations.

Using empirical qualitative research, this book conceptualises and demonstrates the value of local practical knowledge for peacebuilding in the context of Northern Ireland. There are increasing calls to involve local people to ensure legitimacy, relevance, and sustainability when seeking to build peace and transform violent conflict. However, as peacebuilding becomes increasingly professionalised, this raises fundamental questions about whose knowledge matters for building peace and what kind of knowledge matters. Seeking to address these questions and to learn from applied practice, this book provides a qualitative empirical research study, investigating 40 practitioners active in conflict transformation at a grassroots level in Northern Ireland over 50 years. This research led not only to recapturing lost knowledge from practitioners, but also to a neglected ‘virtue’ – the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom, phronesis. This book argues that phronesis has deepened our understanding of why ‘local’ practical knowledge is vitally important and calls for its global rediscovery as knowledge necessary for building sustainable peace. This book will be of much interest to practioners and students in the fields of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, philosophy, and British and Irish politics.

Prefiguring Peace: Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding Partnerships, a longitudinal study of more than ten years (1993-2008), focuses on the major peacebuilding initiatives with an educational encounter-based approach in Israel and Palestine. It examines how non-governmental peacebuilding initiatives adapt to radically changing environments, the challenges they face, and why some are able to adapt and survive while others do not. Michelle I. Gawerc explores two aspects of adaptation--the ability to maintain resources and legitimacy with critical constituencies outside the organization, and the ability to continue to function effectively as an organization. Her study shows that when the environment became more tumultuous and hostile, the effectiveness and even survival of these organizations depended to a significant degree on their ability to manage the power asymmetry between the two sides and work as equally as possible. Indeed, it became critical for building and maintaining trust and respect in the partnership; for preserving legitimacy with one's partner; for maintaining staff and active participant commitment; for managing internal conflict; and even for managing resources. Organizations that failed to deal effectively with matters of equality, and the needs and desires of both sides, ended up struggling to maintain commitment or were doused in conflict that could have been tempered if they strived for more equality. Encompassing various fields, this research contributes to the broad fields of peace and conflict resolution, social movements, and organizational studies. It offers critical insight into how organizations adapt to sudden and drastic changes: what is problematic, what is possible, and what allows some groups to survive while others do not. In addition, it has great import for building sustainable coalitions across inequality, asymmetry, and difference.