Why Negotiate When You Can Criminalize? Lessons for Conflict Transformation from Northern Ireland and South Africa

Research on negotiating with criminalized actors generally assumes the criminal label as a given, neglecting the significance of criminalization itself. This article addresses this gap arguing that the processes of criminalization and decriminalization embody important incentive structures affecting peace negotiations. Specifically, for conflict transformation to effectively occur, criminalization needs to be orientated away from a criminalization of actors and on to specific acts to legitimize nonviolent political expression and negotiations. These arguments will be advanced through a comparative study of Northern Ireland and South Africa, adopting a conflict transformation framework, and drawing on original interviews and archival material.     

From aid negotiation to aid effectiveness: the case of food and nutrition security in Ethiopia

This paper looks at aid ownership through the lens of negotiations that take place between a country and its development partners (DPs). Based on the case of Ethiopian food security policies, it combines a structural analysis of the negotiation capital of both parties with an actor-oriented analysis of the institutional setting through which negotiations take place. First, it shows that the growing influence donors have come to have in the shaping of Ethiopian public policies results from the relative loss of legitimacy the government has experienced after the 2005 political crisis and its greater need for external economic assistance. Second, the more recent creation of a negotiation platform between the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) and its DPs has allowed the GoE to enhance donor’s alignment with its development policies and regain some control over its development agenda, while giving them more room to contribute to several food and nutrition security policy reforms which have been positively evaluated. The paper stresses the need for donors to better recognise the centrality of politics in any aid intervention.     

India,developmental multilateralism and the Doha ministerial conference

Despite its growing status as an ‘emerging’ power, perceptions of India’s current and future role in multilateral organisations continue to be overshadowed by its reputation for blocking rather than supporting progress in multilateral negotiations on grounds of national sovereignty and Third Worldism. In this article we suggest a more positive interpretation of India’s role through a close analysis of its diplomacy during the 2001 Doha Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (wto). The Indian delegation attempted proactively to shape the agenda of the negotiations and to promote a form of developmental multilateralism that might correct the perceived imbalances within the substantive commitments to and structure and processes of the wto. India failed to get its way at the time, but the ongoing deadlock at Doha demonstrates the continuing salience of such alternative conceptions of global justice.     

Peace education and childhood

Peace studies and peace education are multifaceted processes focusing on diverse audiences from children in elementary grades to those involved in political negotiations at the highest levels. This paper addresses the foundational importance of including conflict embedded in adult-child relationships in peace education. It conceptually grounds assignments for university level courses designed to teach concepts linked to peace education through the vehicle of understanding violence against children. Such learning is designed to liberate students from the hegemony of adultism, the colonial relationship between adults and children and in turn to contribute to the advancement of peace education. Such pedagogy reflects the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child’s call for educational measures to protect and support children’s human dignity. Such an approach is especially relevant for peace education, as a large body of research across disciplines has provided substantial evidence of a significant relationship between childhood experiences of violence and subsequent juvenile and adult behavioral and social problems including conflict and violence. The approach and assignments described in this paper reflect insights about the use of narratives of childhood experiences, the etiology and effects of violence against children and the reproduction of conflict and violence across generations.     

Self-determination and the Use of Referendums: the Case of Scotland

The Scottish Nationalist Party’s majority in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections opened up a wide and interesting debate on the variety of options for Scotland’s constitutional future (ranging from the status quo through a variety of intermediate options to full independence), and with it, also the innovate possibility of a multi-option referendum, reflecting the preferences of the people of Scotland. However, while the UK Government agreed that the future of Scotland’s place within the Union was for the people of Scotland to vote on, it strongly contested the Scottish Parliament’s competence to legislate for the referendum, thus ensuring a role for itself and the UK Parliament in its design. After a period of negotiations, the UK and Scottish Governments signed the Edinburgh Agreement on the 15th October 2012, enabling the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a single question referendum, and expressing their commitment to work together in the interests of all involved. This article begins looking at the background, legal framework and negotiations leading up to the Edinburgh Agreement. It then argues that, while the Agreement is notably significant and has allowed for the smooth and fast development of the process so far, by excluding the possibility of including a third option of ‘more devolution’ on the ballot paper, it is having a series of negative consequences for the current debate, namely that it is more limited, confusing and uncertain, and largely unbalanced in favour of the ‘no’ side.     

Financial Markets Must Not Return to "Bad Old Ways"

Thanks to the draining effects of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown emanating from Wall Street, a powershift away from American dominance is taking place. Caught between a rising China and an America in relative decline, the new leadership in Japan is recalibrating its post-World War II relationships. The G-20 has usurped the role once played by the G-8 as the governing committee of globalization. And the symbiotic coupling of "Chimerica", born out of the credit bubble built up over the past two decades, is being put to the test.
In this section, the new prime minister of Japan, the president of the European Union, the president of Brazil and a leading economic historian assess these shifts.     

Crises and critical junctures in authoritarian regimes: addressing uprisings’ temporalities and discontinuities

Abstract

In this article, we aim at sharpening common understandings of the notion of political crisis to better explain the trajectories of authoritarian transformations during popular uprisings. We make three major claims. First, we propose a definition of crisis as brief moments of institutional fluidity and openness in which a process can take different directions. We delineate the crisis concept from the concept of critical junctures and outline how our approach contributes to the methodological debate on ‘near misses’. Second, we indicate how the de-institutionalisation processes leading up to a crisis are to be analytically distinguished from within-crisis moments. We argue in favour of a discontinuity approach that takes into account the different temporalities of gradual lead-up processes and rapid within-crisis dynamics. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical and analytical reasoning with concrete cases from the authoritarian crises of the Arab uprisings, whilst suggesting that our argument can travel to other areas of research in which crisis narratives have gained prominence.     

How Terrorism Ceases: The Tupamaros in Uruguay

In order to understand how the Tupamaros ended it is necessary to give an overview of Uruguay's situation in the 1950s and 1960s and explain why in this relatively rich South American country an urban guerilla group developed. The first section presents the topographical, historical, socio-political and ideological context in which the Tupamaros emerged. The following sections describe the violent organization's “career” and point out some of its structural traits such as ideology, strategy and tactics, support milieu and interaction dynamics. As to the end of the guerilla group, first the question is discussed whether a pacific outcome of the conflict by negotiations would have been possible. Then the reasons for the rapid and total military defeat of the insurgents are analyzed as well as the long-term consequences of their organization's destruction.     

Talking to "Terrorists": Towards an Independent Analytical Framework for the Study of Violent Substate Activism

"Terrorism Studies" as a specific discipline is a comparatively recent addition to the social sciences and is still grappling with questions relating to a proper or appropriate methodology. This article argues that research within the field is often based neither on primary sources nor set within an independent analytical framework. Rather, it is characterized by an "aligned" position dependent on a research hermeneutic of crisis management, which perpetuates the "received view." Talking to "terrorists" and the use of social identity theory, applied in a context of cultural difference, are here proposed as a methodology enabling independent analysis.     

Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March

Although the study of local cultures has become established in American sociology, it often ignores the contested nature of how culture emerges and is negotiated within the context of small groups. To this end, we address the concept of infighting, a subtype of conflict, as it operates within a small group framework. Building on an ethnographic study of the Chicago Dyke March, we demonstrate that infighting highlights competing ideologies that may remain implicit in the absence of such conflict. Infighting treats divergent meaning systems as part of local contention between rival cliques and power centers. These ideological battles both reflect pre-existing differences between subgroups and serve to make explicit and public such differences, both in their background characteristics and in their interests. In the process infighting directs attention away from shared concerns and group building to questions of strategy, transforming the small group into an arena of ideological production and factional rivalry. Infighting recasts a group from a space of consensus to a contested political arena. We elaborate four analytic processes through which infighting connects to ideology and small group culture: infighting emphasizes the multivocality of meaning, cultural heterogeneity, an equilibrium of inclusion and group boundaries, and planning in light of ideologies of power.     

Refugees,idps and Citizenship Rights: the perils of humanitarianism in the African Great Lakes region

Persistent civil warfare has created a crisis of protection for vulnerable refugees/returnees and internally displaced people ( idps ) in the African Great Lakes region. This is in the context of increasing state hostility towards refugees, intensified inter-group competition among citizens, and rising xenophobia towards African ‘foreigners’. Humanitarian solutions are often de-contextualised from struggles over entitlements, citizenship and exclusionary practices based on social hierarchies, ethnicity and indigeneity. Hence, they tend to contribute to rather than alleviate the marginality experienced by the displaced. This article argues for further exploration of the processes of identity construction that accompany displacement and humanitarianism and their problematic relationship with sovereignty and citizenship. It suggests that transcending marginality requires greater emphasis on political agency within refugee and idp communities—for their voices to be part of negotiations and conversations on repatriation and integration—in order for them to rejoin the political community.     

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the context of South Caucasus regional security issues: An Armenian perspective†

For more than a quarter-century, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been one of the most important factors influencing the political map of the South Caucasus. On 12 May 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia, and Azerbaijan signed a cease-fire agreement that ended military operations in the conflict zone and has been observed until recently. Negotiations for a peaceful settlement have been underway within the framework of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Minsk Group co-chaired by the USA, Russia, and France since 1992, but society and the elite in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan remain largely unprepared for compromise. Considering the settlement process a zero-sum game, they have generally accused one another of escalating the conflict and of a lack of willingness to restore peace. Other countries and international organizations involved in the negotiations do not share a vision of the future and frequently pursue their own interests. Accordingly, the Karabakh conflict could remain unresolved for decades more. The aim of the paper is a general assessment of the current stage and dynamic of this conflict and the impact of new trends and old obstacles on the prospects for further settlement.     

Reintegrating young combatants: do child-centred approaches leave children—and adults—behind?

This article uses recent experience in Angola to demonstrate that young fighters were not adequately or effectively assisted after war ended in 2002. The government's framework excluded children from accessing formal disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes, and its subsequent attempts to target children have largely failed. More critically the case of Angola calls into question the broader effectiveness and appropriateness of child-centred DDR. First, such targeting is inappropriate to distinct post-conflict contexts and constructs a 'template child' asserted to be more vulnerable and deserving than adult ex-combatants, which does little to further the reintegration of either group, or the rights of the child in a conflict context. Second, child-centred reintegration efforts tend to deny children agency as actors in their own reintegration. Third, such efforts contribute to the normalisation of a much larger ideational and structural flaw of post-conflict peace building, wherein 'success' is construed as the reintegration of large numbers of beneficiaries back into the poverty and marginalisation that contributed to conflict in the first place.     

‘Selective Affinities’: The Reactions of the Council of Europe and the European Union to the Second Armed Conflict in Chechnya (1999 – 2006)

This article aims to compare how the main bodies of the European Union and the Council of Europe reacted to the issues raised by the armed conflict in Chechnya: human rights violations; the necessity (or otherwise) of political negotiations between the Chechens and the Russians; and Chechen terrorism. While the requests for political negotiations were quickly dropped by nearly all organs of the Council of Europe (CoE) and European Union (EU), the issue of human rights abuses uncovered a chasm between the legislative and decision-making bodies. The terrorist acts had no impact on either the EU's or the CoE's definition of the conflict in Chechnya, but they did influence EU policy. In sum, this comparison suggests the presence of ‘selective affinities’ between the CoE and EU bodies depending on the issue involved.     

Assessing the G77: 50 years after unctad and 40 years after the nieo

This article views the history of the Group of 77 through the lens of its relations with unctad’s establishment in 1964, its unsuccessful struggle for the nieo in the 1970s, and the subsequent loosening of ties. The debt crisis of the 1980s, the Uruguay Round negotiations, and the arrival of the wto are seen as crucial forces unravelling the previously close links. Growing differentiation among developing countries and the changing leadership of the G77 are also cited as important influences on its current relationship with unctad.     

当前土以外交危机的原因及其影响分析

土以关系是中东地区重要的双边关系之一。作为中东地区比较"另类"的两个国家,双方长期保持着良好的双边关系,甚至还缔结了军事同盟协议。但是,"马尔马拉事件"引发了两国之间的外交危机。2011年9月,联合国有关"马尔马拉事件"的报告出炉,进一步恶化了双边关系。土以危机的背后隐含了双方对巴以冲突不同态度的深层次矛盾,彰显出两国之间战略合作基础的不牢固。同时体现出以色列在中东地区追求绝对安全和土耳其"东进"政策之间存在着战略分歧。土以外交危机不仅给两国关系带来负面影响,同时在"阿拉伯之春"的背景下,土以外交危机对美国的中东战略造成不利影响,对中东地区的力量格局产生一定的冲击。     

Shared History Project: A PRIME Example of Peace-Building Under Fire

Minimal peace building during a violent conflict is suggested as a strategy for future post-conflict peace processes. This paper describes a process of five workshops in which Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli teachers developed a joint school textbook of two narratives (an Israeli and a Palestinian) in regard to three dates in their mutual conflict: the Balfour Declaration, the 1948 war and the 1987 Intifada. The teachers developed these two narratives to be taught in their classrooms. All these activities took place under severe conditions of asymmetry of power relations of occupation (of the Palestinians) and of suicide bombers (against Israelis) throughout the project. The Two-State solution requires in our view textbooks of two narratives, so students learn to respect the narrative of the Other.     

NEGOTIATION AND MEDIATION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR - THE GERMAN EXPERIENCE

The article argues that one should look not only at attempts to reduce governmental regulation via privatization and deregulation, but also to pay attention to new modes of dispute-resolution in highly complex and controversial issues. Following an alleged 'crisis of regulatory policy', the authors discuss ways and means of negotiation and mediation in the public sector. Based on American approaches, the German experience is at the forefront of their interest. The systematic and at the same time empirically oriented analysis looks at 'alternative' ways to regulate through cooperative behaviour, evaluates attempts at unassisted and assisted negotiations as a means of conflict resolution, and sheds light on the necessary framework for the use of mediation policies and techniques. A careful optimism on the use of negotiation and mediation in public sector disputes prevails.     

Cacophonies of Aid,Failed State Building and NGOs in Haiti: setting the stage for disaster,envisioning the future

The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was a catastrophe not only for the loss of life it caused, but also because it destroyed the very thin layer of state administrative capacity that was in place in the country. This article argues that the fragility of the Haitian state institutions was exacerbated by international strategies that promoted NGOs as substitutes for the state. These strategies have generated a vicious circle that, while solving immediate logistical problems, ended up weakening Haiti's institutions. However, the article does not call for an overarching condemnation of NGOs. Instead, it explores two cases of community-based NGOs, Partners In Health and Fonkoze, that have contributed to creating durable social capital, generated employment and provided functioning services to the communities where they operated. The article shows that organisations that are financially independent and internationally connected, embrace a needs-based approach to their activities and share a long-term commitment to the communities within which they operate can contribute to bringing about substantial improvement for people living in situations of extreme poverty. It concludes that in the aftermath of a crisis of the dimension of the January earthquake it is crucial to channel support towards organisations that show this type of commitment.     

Conflict Transformation and Civil Society: The Case of Nagorno-Karabakh

If Armenian and Azerbaijani negotiators ever agree on the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh, it will not necessarily resolve the long-running conflict, because any peace treaty would require the consent of the Karabakh Armenians, whose political representatives are currently excluded from peace negotiations. It is difficult to imagine the Karabakh Armenians consenting to such a treaty without a change in their perception of the Azerbaijanis. According to the theory of conflict transformation/peacebuilding, Nagorno-Karabakh’s civil society should be able to make a contribution to this change. Using the example of four Nagorno-Karabakh civil society organisations, this study shows how they positively or negatively influence conflict transformation.