Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war culminated in peace accords in 1996, but the postwar transition has been marked by continued violence, including lynchings and the rise of gangs, as well as ...massive wage-labor exodus to the United States. For the Mam Maya municipality of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, inhabited by a predominantly indigenous peasant population, the aftermath of war and genocide resonates with a long-standing tension between state techniques of governance and ancient community-level power structures that incorporated concepts of kinship, gender, and generation. Showing the ways in which these complex histories are interlinked with wartime and enduring family/class conflicts,Maya after Warprovides a nuanced account of a unique transitional postwar situation, including the complex influence of neoliberal intervention.
Drawing on ethnographic field research over a twenty-year period, Jennifer L. Burrell explores the after-war period in a locale where community struggles span culture, identity, and history. Investigating a range of tensions from the local to the international, Burrell employs unique methodologies, including mapmaking, history workshops, and an informal translation of a historic ethnography, to analyze the role of conflict in animating what matters to Todosanteros in their everyday lives and how the residents negotiate power. Examining the community-based divisions alongside national postwar contexts,Maya after Warconsiders the aura of hope that surrounded the signing of the peace accords, and the subsequent doubt and waiting that have fueled unrest, encompassing generational conflicts. This study is a rich analysis of the multifaceted forces at work in the quest for peace, in Guatemala and beyond.
InA Common JusticeUriel I. Simonsohn examines the legislative response of Christian and Jewish religious elites to the problem posed by the appeal of their coreligionists to judicial authorities ...outside their communities. Focusing on the late seventh to early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day Tunisia in the west, Simonsohn explores the multiplicity of judicial systems that coexisted under early Islam to reveal a complex array of social obligations that connected individuals across confessional boundaries. By examining the incentives for appeal to external judicial institutions on the one hand and the response of minority confessional elites on the other, the study fundamentally alters our conception of the social history of the Near East in the early Islamic period.
Contrary to the prevalent scholarly notion of a rigid social setting strictly demarcated along confessional lines, Simonsohn's comparative study of Christian and Jewish legal behavior under early Muslim rule exposes a considerable degree of fluidity across communal boundaries. This seeming disregard for religious affiliations threatened to undermine the position of traditional religious elites; in response, they acted vigorously to reinforce communal boundaries, censuring recourse to external judicial institutions and even threatening transgressors with excommunication.
Why do some societies choose to adopt federal settlements in the face of acute ethnic conflict, while others do not? Neophytos Loizides examines how acrimoniously divided Cyprus could re-unify by ...adopting a federal and consociational arrangement inspiring similar attempts in its region.
Loizides asserts that institutional innovation is key in designing peace processes. Analyzing power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the return of displaced persons in Bosnia, and the preparatory mandate referendum in South Africa, he shows how divided societies have implemented novel solutions despite conditions that initially seemed prohibitive. Turning to Cyprus, he chronicles the breakthrough that led to the exhumations of the missing after 2003, and observes that a society's choice of narratives and institutions can overcome structural constraints. While Loizides points to the relative absence of successful federal and consociational arrangements among societies evolving from the "post-Ottoman space," he argues that neither elites nor broader societies in the region must be held hostages to the past.
To effect lasting and positive change, Loizides encourages stakeholders in divided societies to be prepared to identify, redesign, and implement innovative new institutions. Examining successful peace mediations and identifying the shared experience and commonalities between Cyprus and other divided societies promises not only to inform the tackling of the Cyprus problem but also to provide transferable knowledge with broader implications for the fields of peace studies and conflict resolution.
The world and Darfur Grzyb, Amanda F
The world and Darfur,
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This updated edition of The World and Darfur brings together genocide scholars from a range of disciplines - social history, art history, military history, African studies, media studies, literature, ...political science, and sociology - to provide a cohesive and nuanced understanding of the international response to the crisis in Western Sudan. Contributing authors, including Eric Reeves, Frank Chalk, Eric Markusen, and Samuel Totten, look at the lessons learned from the United Nations' failure to intervene during the Rwandan genocide, the representation of Darfur in the mainstream media, atrocity investigations, activist and NGO campaigns, art exhibitions and political rhetoric, and the role of the international community in the discourse of genocide prevention and intervention. For a complete list of contributors please visit www.mqup.ca
Katharine Adeney demonstrates that institutional design is the most important explanatory variable in understanding the different intensity and types of conflict in the two countries rather than the ...role of religion. Adeney examines the extent to which previous constitutional choices explain current day conflicts.
While a number of publications show that natural resources are associated with internal armed conflict, surprisingly little research looks at how natural resources affect post-conflict peace. This ...article therefore investigates the relationship between natural resources and post-conflict peace by analyzing new data on natural resource conflicts. We argue that the effect of natural resources on peace depends on how a country's natural resources can constitute a motive or opportunity for armed conflict. In particular, three mechanisms may link natural resources to conflict recurrence: disagreements over natural resource distribution may motivate rebellion; using natural resources as a funding source creates an opportunity for conflict; and natural resources may aggravate existing conflict, acting either as motivation or opportunity for rebellion, but through other mechanisms than distributional claims or funding. Our data code all internal armed conflicts between 1946 and 2006 according to the presence of these resource-conflict links. We claim such mechanisms increase the risk of conflict recurrence because access to natural resources is an especially valuable prize worth fighting for. We test our hypotheses using a piecewise exponential survival model and find that, bivariately, armed conflicts with any of these resource-conflict mechanisms are more likely to resume than non-resource conflicts. A multivariate analysis distinguishing between the three mechanisms reveals that this relationship is significant only for conflicts motivated by natural resource distribution issues. These findings are important for researchers and policymakers interested in overcoming the 'curse' associated with natural resources and suggest that the way forward lies in natural resource management policies carefully designed to address the specific resource-conflict links.
This article presents new data on the start and end dates and the means of termination for armed conflicts, 1946–2005. These data contribute to quantitative research on conflict resolution and ...recurrence in three important respects: the data cover both interstate and intrastate armed conflicts, the data cover low-intensity conflicts, and the data provide information on a broad range of termination outcomes. In order to disaggregate the UCDP-PRIO Armed Conflict dataset into multiple analytical units, this dataset introduces the concept of conflict episodes, defined as years of continuous use of armed force in a conflict. Using these data, general trends and patterns are presented, showing that conflicts do not exclusively end with decisive outcomes such as victory or peace agreement but more often under unclear circumstances where fighting simply ceases. This pattern is consistent across different types of conflict, as is the finding that victories are more common in conflicts with short duration. The article then examines some factors that have been found to predict civil war recurrence and explores whether using the new dataset produces similar results. This exercise offers a number of interesting new insights and finds that the determinants for civil war recurrence identified in previous research are sensitive to alternate formulations of conflict termination data. The findings suggest that intrastate conflicts are less likely to recur after government victories or after the deployment of peacekeepers. If the previous conflict is fought with rebels aiming for total control over government or if the belligerents mobilized along ethnic lines, the risk of recurrence increases. The discrepancy in findings with previous research indicates the need for further study of conflict resolution and recurrence, for which this dataset will be useful.
This article presents ViEWS – a political violence early-warning system that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage, and sketches the methodological ...innovations required to achieve these objectives. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts at the country and subnational level for 36 months into the future and all three UCDP types of organized violence: state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence in Africa. The article presents the methodology and data behind these forecasts, evaluates their predictive performance, provides selected forecasts for October 2018 through October 2021, and indicates future extensions. ViEWS is built as an ensemble of constituent models designed to optimize its predictions. Each of these represents a theme that the conflict research literature suggests is relevant, or implements a specific statistical/machine-learning approach. Current forecasts indicate a persistence of conflict in regions in Africa with a recent history of political violence but also alert to new conflicts such as in Southern Cameroon and Northern Mozambique. The subsequent evaluation additionally shows that ViEWS is able to accurately capture the long-term behavior of established political violence, as well as diffusion processes such as the spread of violence in Cameroon. The performance demonstrated here indicates that ViEWS can be a useful complement to nonpublic conflict-warning systems, and also serves as a reference against which future improvements can be evaluated.
Reviews the book Constructive Conflicts: From Emergence to Transformation (6th Ed.) by Bruce W. Dayton and Louis Kriesberg (2022). Constructive Conflicts wants to equip its readers with a ...ready-to-use conceptual toolkit for identifying, analyzing, and transforming conflicts. The book is addressed at three types of readers: those who would simply like to know more about conflicts, those who seek advice on how to engage in conflicts constructively, and those who manage conflicts as part of their profession. All three of these may of course include psychologists. The book requires no previous knowledge of conflict studies or any other academic field. Instead, it provides a very accessible and well-structured introduction to the topic. Throughout the book, the reader can feel the intellectual fascination driving its authors, Bruce W. Dayton and Louis Kriesberg, and their genuine desire to share their full-fledged expertise most effectively. To summarize. First published in 1998, Constructive Conflicts is now available in its sixth edition. Even for readers not familiar with the previous editions, it is palpable how much careful work has gone into collecting and processing the book’s contents as well as into polishing their exposition. Despite the mentioned idiosyncrasies (and quite a few typos), the book fully lives up to its promises: It provides a comprehensive, very well-organized, and easily accessible introduction to constructive approaches to understanding and dealing with conflicts, broadly defined. Readers from the intended audiences will certainly not be disappointed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
In this nuanced and detailed study of newspaper reporting during the escalation of the second Intifada in the fall of 2000, Daniel Dor shows how real events are subject to distortion and manipulation ...by the media. In an analysis of the heart of Israel's media establishment -- the newspapers Yediot Ahronot, Ma'ariv, and Ha'aretz -- he finds a wide gap between the reality reported by field reporters and the eventual newspaper accounts framed by editors. Led by beliefs, opinions, and emotional responses rather than the facts provided by their reporters, these editors created a platform on which a new and fearful narrative for Israeli--Palestinian relations was built. Yet while Dor demonstrates that the media construct the news rather than simply report it, his sophisticated analysis also shows that no one entity or person is responsible. Rather than a supreme authority, Dor argues, it is the influence of fear, anger, ignorance, and a desire to please and sell newspapers that threatens the freedom of the press in a liberal democracy.
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