The field of peacemaking is in turbulent change. There are more peacemaking actors than before but fewer success stories, and an increasing number of violent conflicts tend to resist negotiated agreements. Tools and practices created for traditional inter- and intra-state conflicts have become ineffective and revision of old mediation practices is called for. This book examines how the private peacemaking organisations have faced this challenge. In the 21st century, private peacemakers have become a central part of peace diplomacy and have appeared as flexible actors whose innovative thinking paves the way for reconsidering and reinventing old practices of mediation. Instead of emphasizing the act of resolution, a new emphasis is given to the transformation of violence into a peace system, the complexity of conflict and the inadequateness of rational management. Furthermore, this shift has brought civic society actors from the field of reconciliation to the field of peace mediation. This new pragmatic approach under development can be called dialogic mediation.

This book explores the role of nongovernmental mediators in promoting “inclusive peace” to negotiating parties in Myanmar’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) negotiations from 2011-2015. The influx of NGO mediators directly engaging with the negotiating parties and promoting the inclusivity norm coupled with the salience of discourse around “all-inclusiveness” at the end of the NCA process forms a puzzle around the agency that NGO mediators wield in influencing political outcomes, despite their lack of political and material leverage.The author argues that NGO mediators can effectively promote norms, using mediation processes as a site of norm diffusion. Bespoke international conflict resolution NGOs have become key mediation actors, within the last three decades through creating the niche world of “private diplomacy” and acting as "norm entrepreneurs" at the same time. As informal third parties, these NGO mediators directly engage with politically sensitive actors or convene unofficial peace talks. As NGOs, they are part of an epistemic community of mediation practice, professionalizing the field and producing knowledge on what peace mediation is and what it ought to be. This dual identity as both NGOs and mediators nicely sets them up with a unique agency to promote and diffuse norms. These norms often reflect the liberal peacebuilding paradigm promoted from the Global North, such as inclusion, gender equality and transitional justice, with the view that these norms are not ends in themselves but as necessary ingredients for effective mediation.The book further questions whether NGOs should promote norms in the first place. The outcome of the NCA process presents a critical and cautionary tale of promoting a presumed universal norm into a given locale and expecting a certain outcome without understanding how an external norm interacts with existing normative frameworks. The book illustrates that while NGO mediators do possess the “normative agency” to effectively promote norms to negotiating parties, my empirical research analyses how their promotion of the “inclusivity” norm to the negotiating parties in Myanmar’s NCA paradoxically resulted in exclusionary outcomes: only half of the armed groups in the ethnic armed groups’ negotiating bloc signed, and civil society was effectively crowded out from meaningful participation despite lofty rhetoric. This is an open access book.

This book analyses the international phenomenon of private peace entrepreneurs. These are private citizens with no official authority who initiate channels of communication with official representatives from the other side of a conflict in order to promote a conflict resolution process. It combines theoretical discussion with historical analysis, examining four cases from different conflicts: Norman Cousins and Suzanne Massie in the Cold War, Brendan Duddy in the Northern Ireland conflict and Uri Avnery in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book defines the phenomenon, examines the resources and activities of private peace entrepreneurs and their impact on the official diplomacy, and examines the conditions under which they can play an effective role in peace-making processes. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16, Peace, justice and strong institutions

For a long time, the Nordic countries have been a region of peace, with the ability to resolve conflicts peacefully among themselves, and a region for peace, actively promoting peace globally. Although efforts to actively brand the Nordic region are ongoing, the Nordic Peace brand is an area with untapped potential. The Nordics have rich traditions for working together on peace and conflict resolution. These joint efforts have grown organically and informally from like-mindedness, letting the common Nordic culture and ways of working foster integration among them where relevant. The people working in the Nordic countries on Nordic cooperation and peace recognize the potential of strengthening the Nordic Peace brand. One area of special potential is increasing focus on the shared Nordic priorities of prevention and the women, peace and security agenda as part of the Nordic Peace brand.

Written by international practitioners and scholars, this pioneering work offers important insights into peace mediation practice today and the role of third parties in the resolution of armed conflicts. The authors reveal how peace mediation has developed into a complex arena and how multifaceted assistance has become an indispensable part of it. Offering unique reflections on the new frameworks set out by the UN, they look at the challenges and opportunities of third-party involvement. With its policy focus and real-world examples from across the globe, this is essential reading for researchers of peace and conflict studies, and a go-to reference point for advisors involved in peace processes.

This book examines the theory and practice of interactive peacemaking, centering the role of people in making peace. The book presents the theory and practice of peacemaking as found in contemporary processes globally. By putting people at the center of the analysis, it outlines the possibilities of peacemaking by and for the people whose lives are touched by ongoing conflicts. While considering examples from around the world, this book specifically focuses on peacemaking in the Georgian-South Ossetian context. It tells the stories of individuals on both sides of the conflict, and explores why people choose to make peace, and how they work within their societies to encourage this. This book emphasizes theory built from practice and offers methodological guidance on learning from practice in the conflict resolution field. This book will be of much interest to students and practitioners of peacemaking, conflict resolution, South Caucasus politics and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This updated and revised second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding contains cutting-edge analyses of contemporary attempts to reach and sustain peace. The book covers the main actors and dynamics of peacebuilding, as well as the main challenges that it faces, with accessible chapters. The volume is comprehensive, covering everything from the main international institutions for peacebuilding to the links between peacebuilding and climate change, or peacebuilding and trauma. It is also firmly interdisciplinary, with a number of chapters devoted to showcasing how different disciplines interpret peacebuilding and how they contribute to it. Bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners on peacebuilding, many from the Global South, the handbook offers a valuable “hands-on” perspective on how peace can be secured and sustained. There is a significant emphasis on comparison and the book shows how peacebuilding is best examined from the vantage point of multiple cases. The book is organised into six thematic sections: Part I: Architecture and Actors Part II: Reading Peacebuilding Part III: Issues and Approaches Part IV: Violence and Security Part V: Everyday Living Part VI: Disciplinary Approaches This book will be essential reading for students of peacebuilding, mediation and post-conflict reconstruction, and of great interest to students of statebuilding, intervention, civil wars, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

"Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism presents thirty-six case studies featuring third-party peacemakers found within Jewish rabbinic literature. Each case study is explored through three layers of analysis: text, theory, and practice. The textual analysis consists of close literary and historical readings of legends and historical accounts as found within classical, medieval, and early-modern rabbinic literature, many of which are critically analyzed here for the first time. The theoretical analysis consists of analyzing the models of third-party peacemaking imbedded within the various cases studies by comparing them with other cultural and religious models of third-party peacemaking and conflict resolution, in particular the Arab-Islamic sulha and contemporary Interactive Problem-Solving Workshops. The final layer of analysis, based upon the author's personal experiences in years of dong conflict resolution education, trainings, and actual third-party religious peacemaking in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, relates to the potential practical implications of these case studies to serve as indigenous models and sources of inspiration for third-party mediation and peacemaking in both interpersonal and intergroup conflicts today"--

This open access book introduces adaptive mediation as an alternative approach that enables mediators to go beyond liberal peace mediation, or other determined-design models of mediation, in the context of contemporary conflict resolution and peace-making initiatives. Adaptive mediation is grounded in complexity theory, and is specifically designed to cope with highly dynamic conflict situations characterized by uncertainty and a lack of predictability. It is also a facilitated mediation process whereby the content of agreements emerges from the parties to the conflict themselves, informed by the context within which the conflict is situated. This book presents the core principles and practices of adaptive mediation in conjunction with empirical evidence from four diverse case studies – Colombia, Mozambique, The Philippines, and Syria – with a view to generate recommendations for how mediators can apply adaptive mediation approaches to resolve and transform contemporary and future armed conflicts.

This volume explores the Western-led liberal order that is claimed to be in crisis. Currently, the West appears less as a modernizing or civilizing entity leading the way and more as being engulfed in a deep crisis. Simultaneously, the West still appears to be needed in order to imagine the global order by promoters of liberal peace as well as its opponents. This book asks how and why “crisis” is needed for constituting “the West,” liberal, and global order and how these three are conjoined and reinvented. The book encompasses narratives endorsing and rejecting the West and the liberal international order, as well as alternative visions for a post-Western world conceived within the rising and challenging powers. The study is of interest to scholars and students of international relations, critical security studies, peace and conflict research, and social sciences in general.