Post-Conflict Reconciliation

This article examines the positionality of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge through fieldwork in qualitative research in Northern Uganda. While scholarly literature has evolved on the positionality and experiences of researchers from the Global North in (post)conflict environments, little is known about the positionality and experiences of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge. This article is based on interviews and focus groups with research assistants and respondents in Northern Uganda. Using a phenomenological approach, this article analyzes the positionality and experiences of these research associates and respondents during fieldwork. Three themes emerged from these interviews and are explored in this article: power, fatigue, and safety. This article emphasizes that researchers need to be reflexive in their practices and highlights the need to reexamine how researchers are trained in qualitative methods before going into the field. This article is further critical of the behavior of researchers and how research agendas impact local stakeholders during and after fieldwork.

Abstract: What accounts for low-intensity intergroup violence? In this paper, we explore the micro-level determinants of low-intensity sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which has marked the post-1998 peace agreement period. We use original cross-sectional time series violence data for the 2005-2012 period at a disaggregated sub-national level, the ward, and a wide variety of social and political indicators. In particular, we assess the impact of within-ward ethnic composition, on the one hand, and the ethnic composition of neighboring wards, on the other. We find that the number of intergroup violent events peak in wards where there is parity between groups, and in predominantly Catholic (Protestant) wards that border predominantly Protestant (Catholic) wards. The rationale is that violence takes place where groups have both opportunities to perpetrate sectarian violence and strategic incentives to do it. The paper makes several contributions: it demonstrates that violence is ...

National reconciliation has increasingly become an integral part of post-conflict recovery processes in Africa. What national reconciliation means, how it differs from interpersonal reconciliation and to what extent governments can facilitate reconciliation at all remains under debate. This article examines government institutions intended to facilitate national reconciliation processes in South Africa, Rwanda
and Burundi. Rather than normatively prescribing what governments should be doing, this article seeks to examine what governments are doing as a starting point to understanding what national reconciliation is.

Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict began since its independence and turned into civil
war by 1983 and continued until 2009 between government and LTTE (Liberation of Tigers of
Tamil Eelam). The LTTE fought to establish a Tamil Independent State due to continuous
discrimination and violent persecution by the majority Sinhalese. After 26 years long bloody
war, which ended in 2009, it was burning question on reconciliation process.

This essay broadly outlines the approach developed at the Jena Center for Reconciliation Studies (JCRS). Two claims ground the Jena approach: 1. Reconciliation is found even in conflicts’ deepest expressions and post-conflict situations require significant reconciling attention to actualize social capacities. 2. Justice is always relevant to reconciliation and suboptimal justice conceptions are often hindrances rather than helpful for post-conflict activities. The first claim is Martin Leiner´s "Hölderlin Perspective" - the JCRS keystone for understanding and dealing with conflict. The second claim is developed using classical Aristotelian and contemporary philosophical thought, with particular attention to the works of Friedrich Schiller – an important historical source of inspiration for scholars in Jena. Justice is best defined as the political decision-maker’s stable disposition to prudent action ordered to the community’s best flourishing. This conception integrates a subsidiarity logic that sees bottom-up or local prioritization as inherent to the justice conception, and not just practical implications of justice.  Based upon the above reconciliation and justice conceptions, the essay draws out three priorities: ethical, political, and local. Primarily philosophical insights are utilized to organize, explain, and argue for conflict-related studies having a teleological-reconciliation framework, within which many developing disciplines, interventions, and fields of study are organized. Respecting the local priority, this essay is written from a viewpoint of applied ethics and gives special attention to historical conflicts relevant to the author in the USA and Germany. These contextualized examples demonstrate the relevance of a Jena approach to current conflicts and post-conflict situations.

This article is about a relatively new version of the ‘emerging’ jus post bellum concept. It asks whether the jus post bellum as ‘integrity’ is useful as a normative guide in the interpretation of international criminal law during transitions when the requirements of international criminal law are ambiguous or unclear. It develops the main elements of the jus post bellum as integrity as an analytical framework. It then evaluates the theoretical and practical application of the concept in relation to the task of the International Criminal Court in evaluating the ‘alternative sentences’ regime in Colombia. It argues that a Dworkinian approach to international criminal law must make certain assumptions about the international legal order which are difficult to sustain. The difficulties discussed here are related to the structural conditions needed for a ‘community of principle’ to arise in Dworkin’s theory. The article demonstrates that the jus post bellum as integrity may be useful for identifying the principles of international criminal law that should apply to states in transition from conflict to peace. However, despite its usefulness, the concept is susceptible to the usual arguments against adopting ‘natural law’ constructions in international legal method (and post-conflict law).

This research report into Music, Development, and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka offers a detailed examination of the Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation, focusing on the ways in which the activities of the Music Cooperation (festivals, capacity-building, and other music events) are impacting reconciliation between the nation’s people in the post-civil war period. It presents both qualitative and quantitative data gathered during three months of fieldwork in Sri Lanka, and contextualizes this with reference to literature from the fields of peacebuilding and social psychology. Prior to this research, an empirical or theoretically-informed understanding of how (if at all) the music development activities of the Music Cooperation might be supporting reconciliation had not been developed. This research engages with that task and offers some answers, and recommendations for future action.

Sebha is the key and the most populated city in Fezzan,
the South of Libya, and the main gateway between
North and South. In 2018, it es􀆟matly hosts around
210,000 inhabitants constitu􀆟ng around 2/3rd of its
governorate.
It has experienced figh􀆟ng and damage, especially in
2011 and 2014. Most of the displaced were within the
boundaries of the city and its immediate
neighborhoods, accelerating the development of its
informal settlements.
15,190 IDPs from Sebha outside the region has
returned, cons􀆟tu􀆟ng today 7% of the population. This
is while there are s􀆟ll 8,390 displaced IDPs.
Sebha became also a major step on the migra􀆟on road
from Africa to the North. 35,040 migrants were
accounted for in August 2018 (18% of the municipality
popula􀆟on), in an accelera􀆟ng trend. 89% of the
migrants are from Africa, mainly Niger and Nigeria.
Their humanitarian situation is a priority issue.

This article examines whether there is a steady pattern of celebrity engagement with humanitarian issues through a study of the involvement of U2 and Angelina Jolie in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The activism of these two celebrities was limited in both time and content and developed at different phases of the country’s recent history. The article notes that their involvement was idiosyncratic and was not developed at certain ‘turning points’ or ‘critical junctures’ of the conflict. It also argues that their activism was primarily motivated by personal networks: the decision of U2 and Jolie to get involved was prompted by their acquaintance with people who knew and cared about Bosnia. Therefore, the article highlights the role of intermediaries and underlines the need to study the personal networks that initiate and/or facilitate celebrity involvement in social causes.

This article examines power dynamics in political groupings during
the 2014 Afghanistan presidential election and assesses the impact on
political stability and order. The focus is the power dynamics of local
political-economic and identity networks that have come to underpin
and constitute the state in post-2001 international state-building.
The article first seeks to understand how the complex relationships
between the two leading presidential candidates, Ashraf Ghani and
Abdullah Abdullah, and key powerbrokers were negotiated and
subsequently influenced electoral outcomes. Second, focusing on
negotiations over the appointment of the Cabinet ministers, advisers
and staff, and governors, the study maps the restructuring of political
networks within the Afghan state. The analysis reveals the impact of
the election on the redistribution of power and resources, and the
consequences for political order and state stability in the post-2014
period.

This article begins with a literature review of Participatory Photography (PP) that highlights how this tool has been mostly implemented for action research, advocacy, and public health purposes. It shows how scholars have only quite recently begun to recognise its ability to generate change among PP participants. This is followed by a description of the project that was carried out in Kenya, including its background, objectives and daily activities related to peacebuilding. Offering insight into crucial aspects of this work, examples of the photographs taken by participants and related stories are presented. The conclusion is preceded by reflections on the effectiveness, limitations and potential risks involved in carrying out PP projects in post-conflict settings.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ARTICLE
This article is available through the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development site at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15423166.2015.1050798
You can also send the author a private message.

In this article, I examine the relationship between the 1990 Chilean truth commission and international human rights law, and how this relationship informs the work of the truth commission in shaping social and institutional relations in Chile after the 1973-1990 dictatorship. 

The argument running through this article is two-fold.

First, there is a constitutive and creative relationship between the Chilean truth commission and international human rights law. That is, international human rights law, as a ‘global’ legal form, informs the constitution of the Chilean truth commission as a continuing phenomenon; and international human rights law mediates the truth commission’s creative potential to craft ‘truths’ (determining which ‘truths’ are ‘truths’) while also grounding the ‘truths’ by giving them legal authority.

The second aspect of the argument is that the ways in which international human rights law informs, mediates and grounds the ‘lawful truth’ entails subordination of ‘local’ legal forms to the ‘global’ legal form of international human rights. This shows how the craft of the official ‘truth’ of the dictatorship is shaped and authorized by international human rights law, a ‘global’ legal form that carries a normative socio-political, legal and economic form of organizing social and institutional relations. This not only silences coexisting accounts of lawful truths, but it also forecloses the possibility of ‘living together’ after dictatorship beyond the normative forms and meanings carried by international human rights law.

I develop this argument through an ethnography of Chile’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights).

The four-year siege of Sarajevo decimated the city. Some 11,000 civilians were killed, 60 per cent of buildings were damaged or destroyed, and 80 per cent of utilities were disabled. When the war ended in 1995, a “triple transition” occurred throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH): the simultaneous movements from war to peace, communism to democracy, and market socialism to a free-market economy. International attempts at physically rebuilding Sarajevo met with some success: the visible scars from the war are largely gone and violence no longer plagues the city. But reconstruction is incomplete and legacies of the war hang over the city.

Polls in BiH reveal a deep disgust with politics and institutions, and there are serious issues with unemployment, inequality, and social reconciliation. Nearly 90 per cent of the country believes it is headed in the wrong direction. The residents of Canton Sarajevo do not feel represented by institutions by a margin of 3 to 1, and a vast majority support political change. The triple transition has been fraught with difficulties. Ethnic divisions are wider than ever. While 88 per cent of the population support better interethnic relations, very little tangible has been achieved in the way of reconciliation. The economy is dominated by criminality and corruption, not by accountable open markets.

These problems stem from the narrow approach taken to reconstructing Sarajevo. By viewing the city largely in physical terms, international and national groups failed to restore institutions, curb corrupt practices, and counter nationalist political movements that benefited from the complex political structures created by the 1995 Dayton Accords. While each city and post-conflict situation is unique, assessing failures encountered while rebuilding Sarajevo offer five over arching lessons for future reconstruction.

1) Reconstruction efforts must be planned strategically to include the many sectors and actors involved in the process. In Sarajevo, the lack of coordination between donors, local government, and residents of the city undermined successful rebuilding.

2) Local institutional capacity must be strengthened before reconstruction begins. Many failures in Sarajevo could have been avoided by having the necessary urban planning, administrative, and governance structures organized during the earliest years.

3) Oversight and anti-corruption measures must be implemented from the start. Recipients and donors must create solid control systems, be willing to hold local leaders accountable, and have trip-wires that trigger the withholding of salaries or aid for large-scale corruption issues.

4) Urban reconstruction must be accompanied by economic growth. Sustaining returnees depends upon accessible jobs and economic growth. Policies should streamline business legislation and make starting an enterprise as easy as possible.

5) Reconstruction must be recognized as an ecosystem. Functional reconstruction of merely physical aspects is insufficient to recreate a vibrant city. Policymakers should seek to also use educational, economic, and cultural initiatives to rekindle urban life.

Benghazi is the second city of the country with a
population estimated between 715,000 and 812,000
inhabitants within its present administrative
boundaries. Its historical districts of Old Benghazi have
experienced severe damage during the conflict. The
population of the municipality have been subject to
significant displacements (more than half of all
displaced in Libya, 1/3rd of the population of the
municipality), while receiving relatively small number
of IDPs. Most of the displaced remained in the
region/mantika/governorate/mohafaza of Benghazi
and returned to the city after the end of the conflict.

We know we live in a world where people hurt each other, and where armed conflicts are commonplace, recurring quite often even after reaching peace agreements. Nevertheless, we also know we have the abilities to forgive and reconcile after wrongdoing has been committed, that means, after an immoral action has taken place. The processes of forgiveness and reconciliation are part of those human abilities which enable us to break the cycles of violence, and which allow victims to heal and perpetrators to be reintegrated into their communities. Establishing dynamics of forgiveness and reconciliation in post-conflict settings will produce more peaceful societies, where the dignity and rights of each person are respected, and where people are able to fulfil their needs and grow and develop as human beings.

The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement both ended the Bosnian War and created the consociational democracy that exists in Bosnia and Herzegovina to this day. The ethnic autonomy created by the Dayton Agreement has resulted in a frozen conflict between ethnic groups that has manifested itself in the country’s monoethnic education system. This study explores the short-term stability under consociationalism and the long-term stability under a multiethnic education system. Additionally, this study explains the importance of the country’s only multiethnic education system in Brčko District and how it came into existence.

Jo-Marie Burt, From heaven to hell in ten days: the genocide trial in Guatemala, Journal Of Genocide Research Vol. 18 , Iss. 2-3 (2016).
Abstract:
Latin America leads the world in efforts to prosecute perpetrators of gross violations of human rights in domestic courts. Domestic justice offers a number of advantages to international and hybrid tribunals: proceedings take place in close proximity to the site of the atrocities, facilitating victim participation; they are directed by domestic prosecutors and judges, thus contributing to local buy-in; and they can strengthen rule of law and legitimize fragile transitional democracies. The case of Guatemala appears to contradict such arguments, however, given the overturning of the landmark conviction of former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and the ongoing impasse of the proceedings. Drawing on the author’s work as an international observer to the genocide trial, interviews with those directly involved in the case, and comparative research on human rights trials in Latin America, this article suggests an alternative reading. By situating the genocide trial in relation to the broader transitional justice process in Guatemala and in the region more broadly, it argues that current setbacks should be viewed as a backlash to initial transitional justice success that is neither unexpected nor fatal to the accountability process. Second, the article argues that the genocide case is illustrative of a victim-centred approach to human rights prosecutions that hold important lessons for transitional justice theory and practice, and examines the way in which victims of sexual violence were incorporated into prosecutorial strategies and helped to prove that a genocide had taken place in Guatemala. Finally, the article argues that despite the undoing of the genocide verdict, the very fact that the trial took place is historically and politically significant, both for survivors and for the construction of collective memory in Guatemala and Latin America as a whole.

This paper considers the prospect of using the Constitution of Ireland as the basis for a iunited Ireland Constitution. It is perhaps assumed by some political commentators in the South that this approach – similar to the German unification experience – is an obvious starting point. But it is far from clear that this is a workable model. It might have an advantage in giving us a default, a starting point and some sense of continuity that might make agreement on a constitutional arrangement less likely to break down. But at the same time, defaulting to the Irish Constitution’s positions could itself be so divisive as to cause such a breakdown in consensus.

If the Irish Constitution could fill this role, it would have to be overhauled in a major way, leaving a document that might look almost unrecognisable. The practicality of this should be carefully considered, but so too should the risk that unwritten or conventional aspects of the original constitutional order might remain in spite of radical change. This raises the philosophical quandary of the ship of Theseus: is a ship, with all its planks gradually replaced, still the same ship? The paper considers whether the protean nature of this radically amended constitution’s identity – simultaneously the same and vastly different – could offer a road to a successful compromise.

Two self-ascribed ethnic groups- Moro and Lumad- are native to Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Both groups share a common history of oppression from Western colonialism, Christian resettlement, and capitalist interests where the former has waged a more organized insurgency against the Philippine government in the late twentieth century. Due to the political superiority of the Moros, the Lumads are often left marginalized in the various peace processes in Mindanao due to their accommodation to the Moro's call for the creation of anautonomous region under an internal power-sharing agreement. This form of double marginalization against the Lumad promotes a sense of internal colonialism where such arrangements are only left between the Bangsamoro regional government and the Philippine national government, thereby forcing the latter to accommodate to Moro interests. Analyzing the text of the recent peace agreements between the Republic of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (GRP-MILF), the article attempts to understand the conflict dynamics between Moros and Lumads under power-sharing and power-dividing measures. The article concludes that consociationalism in ethnically divided societies often lead to more ethnic cleavages if done haphazardly to favor certain interests while leaving ethnic minorities at a disadvantage.

This dissertation seeks to determine the impact of practices of memorialisation and commemoration of war crime sites from the 1990s on post-conflict reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Through three substantial case studies – Sarajevo, Srebrenica and Prijedor – and using a combination of qualitative research methods – observation, media analysis and semi-structured interviews – it finds memorialisation to be an essential tool for dealing with a traumatic past. However, as currently employed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is also having significant damaging effects on the reconciliation process. The title, How (Not) to Remember, is a phrase borrowed from Ger Duijzings (2007: 161).

The idea of a "holistic approach" to transitional justice suggests that different strategies for dealing with the past such as truth-telling, criminal accountability, memory work, reparations and institutional reform, interact and complement each other. Their timing, sequencing and interrelation remail contentious though. In the specific case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the deep divisions embedded in the State structure and polity have been hindering dialogue across ethnic and political lines for the past decades. In addition, criminal accountability has been the predominant mechanism for dealing with the past. As a matter of fact, no official truth commission has ever been successfully established; while the panorama of non-official truth-telling initiatives has always been characterized by a certain degree of disarray. The challenge ahead is to find a strategy that matches Bosnia and Herzegovina's specificity and priorities.

The Christian narrative of ‘good news’ by missionaries has assisted in the creation of, and breeding the conditions for, radicalization and violence in various countries, including South Africa. Religious narratives were merged with the nationalist ones of colonial and neo-colonial governments which have brought about the dehumanization and loss of identity of the oppressed and marginalized.1 It is those narratives, adopted within neo-colonial contexts, that have been internalized by people and that have bred frustration and resulted in social isolation, often engendering a process of radicalization and violence. It was the task of the missionaries to convey the ‘good news’ to various communities and in South Africa missionaries did so through a particular narrative which did anything but deliver this to the majority of South Africans struggling to make ends meet. The ‘good news’ they proclaimed in most instances supported the oppressive government’s narrative, one which only served to aggravate the oppressive conditions under which indigenous people had to live.2 This chapter will discuss the relationship between narrative and violence in an African context. Subsequently, it will discuss three African contexts (Algeria, Rwanda, South Africa) and the predominant narratives that have engendered radicalization and violence and destabilized those countries. Then the focus turns to the question ‘what kind of narrative should be dominant in South Africa to counter radicalization and violence?’ Then finally, a discussion on how missiology should adopt projects of narrative construction

This article has three parts. First, it identifies, defines and characterises a distinctive trend in modern humanitarianism: that of ‘forensic humanitarianism’. Forensic humanitarianism is often deployed in the wake of atrocity to answer two questions: who are the dead, and how were they killed? These questions have been addressed in diverse contexts with the aim of establishing accountability for atrocities and identifying and returning the dead to their families. Examples include the investigation of the crimes of Argentina’s junta, the trial for genocide of  Guatemala’s former President Rios Montt, the return of human remains to families of the dead in the former-Yugoslavia, and the exhumation of clandestine civil war graves in Spain. Forensic humanitarianism is distinguished by two imperatives that are characteristic of humanitarianism more broadly: adjudicative and ameliorative. These imperatives manifest in the ways in which forensic humanitarianism plays a critical role in justice for atrocity and addresses human suffering. Second, the article historicises the emergence of forensic humanitarianism, showing that it has been shaped by the conjunction of four particular and related histories: humanitarian, legal, political and scientific. Third, and finally, the article asks whether, as a consequence of the practice of forensic humanitarianism, we can argue that the dead, now, can be understood to have human rights.

In preparation for the 2015 general elections of Nigeria, the four biggest opposition parties, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP), the Congress for Progressive Change and a faction of the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) merged to form the All Progressive Congress (APC). This is the first successful merger in the history of Nigerian political parties.
This paper sets out to analyse the process of political recomposition in the lives of Nigeria’s political parties in the build up to the 2015 general elections.

This article offers an ethnographic account of individuals using Christian prayer as a coping strategy - one among others - in their process of healing in the aftermath of the traumas that resulted from the loss of their spouses during the Kuki-Naga ethnic violence that occurred between 1992 and 1998. Relationship with God through prayer provides some succour for people to cope with personal loss in militarised societies across Kangpokpi region in Manipur. Among the survivors, constant acknowledgement of God reveals a particular understanding of
religion and of faith, which helps them mitigate their trauma and loss through forgiveness and validation of humanity.

The past two and a half decades in the South Caucasus leave little hope to entertain for the eventual integration of the region. So far the fragmentation of the South Caucasus into different blocks is the only reality. The different integrational processes and transnational alliances that the South Caucasus countries have engaged in surely contribute to the creation of new spaces for cooperation, but also to the perpetuation of the conflicts in the region. In fact, often conflicts have been defining the design and implementation of these transnational alliances and integrational processes. With this reality, regional transnational integration as an avenue for conflict resolution seems to be part of a vicious circle since conflict resolution is often seen as a precondition for regional integration. This is not only due to the conflicts within and among the countries, but also to the complex and sometimes strained relations with the big neighbors – Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

This paper aims to explore economic options for inserting a wedge in this vicious circle. Convinced that regional economic cooperation could be an important step towards conflict transformation in the South Caucasus, this paper suggests that the prospects of such integration be considered. Be it in the form of exploring opportunities in the different integrational paths that the countries of the South Caucasus have taken or challenging the isolationist economic policies that have outlived their goals and utility, this paper offers all stakeholders to look at economic cooperation with rather than against each other as the option that could lead to the resolution of conflicts in the region.