Creating peace for a city’s intimate enemies is harder than making war. This book is about the trajectories of urban conflict and peace in the politically polarized cities of Jerusalem and Belfast since 1994 – how sometimes there has been hopeful change while at other times debilitating stasis and regression. Based on extensive research, fieldwork, and interviews, Scott Bollens shows how seeking peace in these cities is shaped by the interaction of city-based actors and national elites, and that it is not just a political process, but a social and spatial one that takes place problematically over an extended period. He intertwines academic precision with ethnography and personal narrative to illuminate the complex political and emotional kaleidoscopes of these polarized cities. With hostility and competition among groups defined by ethnic, religious, and nationalistic identity on the increase across the world, this timely investigation contributes to our understanding of today’s fractured cities and nations.

Conflict Analysis: Understanding Causes, Unlocking Solutions is a guide for practitioners seeking to prevent deadly conflict or mitigate political instability. This handbook integrates theory and practice and emphasizes the importance of analyzing the causes of peace as well as the causes of conflict. It stresses that conflict analysis is a social as well as an intellectual process, helping practitioners translate analysis into effective action.

Violent conflicts today are complex and increasingly protracted, involving more nonstate groups and regional and international actors. It is estimated that by 2030—the horizon set by the international community for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals—more than half of the world’s poor will be living in countries affected by high levels of violence. Information and communication technology, population movements, and climate change are also creating shared risks that must be managed at both national and international levels. Pathways for Peace is a joint United Nations†“World Bank Group study that originates from the conviction that the international community’s attention must urgently be refocused on prevention. A scaled-up system for preventive action would save between US$5 billion and US$70 billion per year, which could be reinvested in reducing poverty and improving the well-being of populations. The study aims to improve the way in which domestic development processes interact with security, diplomacy, mediation, and other efforts to prevent conflicts from becoming violent. It stresses the importance of grievances related to exclusion—from access to power, natural resources, security and justice, for example—that are at the root of many violent conflicts today. Based on a review of cases in which prevention has been successful, the study makes recommendations for countries facing emerging risks of violent conflict as well as for the international community. Development policies and programs must be a core part of preventive efforts; when risks are high or building up, inclusive solutions through dialogue, adapted macroeconomic policies, institutional reform, and redistributive policies are required. Inclusion is key, and preventive action needs to adopt a more people-centered approach that includes mainstreaming citizen engagement. Enhancing the participation of women and youth in decision making is fundamental to sustaining peace, as well as long-term policies to address the aspirations of women and young people.

When multiple third-parties (states, coalitions, and international organizations) intervene in the same conflict, do their efforts inform one another? Anecdotal evidence suggests such a possibility, but research to date has not attempted to model this interdependence directly. The current project breaks with that tradition. In particular, it proposes three competing explanations of how previous intervention efforts affect current intervention decisions: a cost model (and a variant on it, a limited commitments model), a learning model, and a random model. After using a series of Markov transition (regime-switching) models to evaluate conflict management behavior within militarized interstate disputes in the 1946-2001 period, this study concludes that third-party intervention efforts inform one another. More specifically, third-parties examine previous efforts and balance their desire to manage conflict with their need to minimize intervention costs (the cost and limited commitments models). As a result, third-parties intervene regularly using verbal pleas and mediation, but rely significantly less frequently on legal, administrative, or peace operations strategies. This empirical threshold to the intervention costs that third-parties are willing to bear has strong theoretical foundations and holds across different time periods and third-party actors. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that the first third-party to intervene in a conflict is most likely to use a strategy designed to help the disputants work toward a resolution of their dispute. After this initial intervention, the level of third-party involvement declines and often devolves into a series of verbal pleas for peace. Such findings cumulatively suggest that disputants hold the key to effective conflict management. If the disputants adopt and maintain an extreme bargaining position or fail to encourage third-parties to accept greater intervention costs, their dispute will receive little more than verbal pleas for negotiations and peace.

On the occasion of his 90th birthday Louis Kriesberg provides an informative account of his career, tracing the trajectory of his discoveries, contributions, and stumbles as he sought to help the advance toward a more sustainable and just peace in the world. His work contributes to ideas and practices in several areas of conflict studies, notably intractable conflicts and their transformation, reconciliation, conflict analysis, and waging conflicts constructively. Although neither an autobiography nor a memoir, he embeds the course of his work in the context of historical events and in the evolving fields of peace studies and conflict resolution. In addition, he discusses the interaction of those fields with major conflicts. The book includes seven previously-published exemplary pieces on these and other topics, a comprehensive list of his publications, and several photos. A discussion of Kriesberg’s work and its significance is provided by George A. Lopez, Professor of Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Civil wars are among the most difficult problems in world politics. While mediation, intervention, and peacekeeping have produced some positive results in helping to end civil wars, they fall short in preventing them in the first place. In Incentivizing Peace, Jaroslav Tir and Johannes Karreth show that considering civil wars from a developmental perspective presents opportunities to prevent the escalation of nascent armed conflicts into full-scale civil wars. The authors demonstrate that highly-structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, or regional development banks) are particularly well-positioned to engage in civil war prevention. When such IGOs have been actively engaged in nations on the edge, their potent economic tools have helped to steer rebel-government interactions away from escalation and toward peaceful settlement. Incentivizing Peace provides enlightening case evidence that IGO participation is a key to better predicting, and thus preventing, the outbreak of civil war.

An authoritative source of information on violent conflicts and peacebuilding processes around the world, Peace and Conflict is an annual publication of the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). The contents of the 2016 edition are divided into three sections: » Global Patterns and Trends provides an overview of recent advances in scholarly research on various aspects of conflict and peace, as well as chapters on armed conflict, violence against civilians, non-state armed actors, democracy and ethnic exclusion, terrorism, defense spending and arms production and procurement, peace agreements, state repression, foreign aid, and the results of the Peace & Conflict Instability Ledger, which ranks the status and progress of more than 160 countries based on their forecasted risk of future instability. » Special Feature spotlights work on measuring micro-level welfare effects of exposure to conflict. » Profiles has been enlarged to survey developments in instances of civil wars, peacekeeping missions, and international criminal justice proceedings that were active around the world during 2014. Frequent visualizations of data in full-color, large-format tables, graphs, and maps bring the analysis to life and amplify crucial developments in real-world events and the latest findings in research. The contributors include many leading scholars in the field from the US and Europe.

Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the District of Aguablanca, Colombia using a range of qualitative research methods, this dissertation unpacks the way in which local knowledge, capacity and agency emerge, evolve and consolidate in operational forms of conflict navigation and coping mechanisms in conflict-driven areas. Furthermore, it suggests points of engagement between local and non-local actors where hybridization of local peace practice and knowledge occurs, focusing in the predominant relevance of endogenous knowledge and the agency of actors to subvert and present alternatives to liberal peace agents in hybridity. The central question is how does local knowledge emerge, evolve and hybridize in peace practice? and, how do local and non-local forms of knowing interact? Three conceptual frameworks are used interchangeably as lens for the analysis Everyday peace, \[local\] endogenous knowledge and hybrid peace. The findings highlight that everyday peace is a reactive mechanism to conflict, closely intertwined to the social manufacturing of the territory and knitted in rational assessments of risk associated to spatial dimensions of conflict. Thus, the leap from reactive to elaborated responses to conflict, occurs at a later stage when multi-level forms of grassroots and elite social organization appear as mechanisms for self-governance of the territory, driving other forms of collective action beyond the everyday. Findings also suggest that social forms of organization appear as the main conduct of information in the coalescence of endogenous and exogenous knowledge, where hybridization of the dynamics of response to conflict occur. However, hybridization remains situated and constrained by low trust, frictions between the top-down and bottom-up approaches, and the assumptions about local capacity made within the liberal paradigm. Diverging from notions in critical peacebuilding which advocate inquiring about the way in which locals attempt to restore social order in the aftermath of conflict, this dissertation proposes to re-historicize and reconstruct the way in which locals have accommodated social life to endure conflict, and the key composites of endogenous peacemaking knowledge. Understanding conflict navigation and local agency as constructed in non-linear trajectories is a critical input for attempts to create bottom-up peace agendas.

“Peacebuilding” serves as a catch-all term to describe efforts by an array of international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and agencies of foreign states to restore or construct a peaceful society in the wake—or even in the midst—of conflict. Despite this variety, practitioners consider themselves members of a global profession. In The Distinction of Peace, Catherine Goetze investigates the genesis of peacebuilding as a professional field of expertise since the 1960s, its increasing influence, and the ways it reflects global power structures. Goetze describes how the peacebuilding field came into being, how it defines who belongs to it and who does not, and what kind of group culture it has generated. Using an innovative methodology, she investigates the motivations of individuals who become peacebuilders, their professional trajectories and networks, and the “good peacebuilder” as an ideal. For many, working in peacebuilding in various ways—as an aid worker on the ground, as a lawyer at the United Nations, or as an academic in a think tank—has become not merely a livelihood, but also a form of participation in world politics. As a field, peacebuilding has developed techniques for incorporating and training new members, yet its internal politics also create the conditions of exclusion that often result in practical failures of the peacebuilding enterprise. By providing a critical account of the social mechanisms that make up the peacebuilding field, Goetze offers deep insights into the workings of Western domination and global inequalities.

Journeys Through Conflict is the story of the Conflict Early Warning Systems (CEWS) project of the International Social Science Research Council. It relates the history of the project, presents its empirically grounded approach to anticipating violent conflict, and shows how the approach may be extended to other social science research arenas. Journeys Through Conflict projects alternate pathways to war and peace by a unique coding, graphing, and computational procedure that takes into account both contested conflict histories and future conflict resolutions.