Rescuing Peacebuilding? Anthropology and Peace Formation*

International Relations (IR) and related social science disciplines focusing on peace and conflict studies have enabled a bureaucratic understanding of peacebuilding and a liberal form of peace. This has extended into a neoliberal type of statebuilding. There is now an impressive international architecture for peace, but its engagement with its subjects in everyday contexts has been less impressive. An earlier group of conflict researchers, grouped around John Burton and later A.J.R. Groom, have long argued that this is partly because IR has concentrated on elite power, problem-solving methodology and positivist epistemologies. It has failed to understand the dynamics, agency and hybridity of human society and institutions when it comes to peace, or that inequality is conflict inducing. Rescuing peacebuilding from neoliberal epistemological frameworks requires an anthropological and ethnographic sensitivity.     

A Poor Mountain City Leaps Forward

ONE Spring in remote antiquity,when Jiandi,a concubine of the legendary emperor Di Ku,was swimming in a river,a black bird landed on the bank and laid an egg.Jiandi consumed the egg and became pregnant.Later she gave birth to Qi,ancestor of the Shang tribe.     

我国县域经济发展的不平衡性分析

县或县级市作为城乡结合部,在国民经济中的地位和作用突出。随着我国社会主义市场经济的纵深发展,县域经济发展存在的不平衡性日趋明显,工业化程度成为拉大县域经济发展差距的主要因素。     

Peace building and spoilers

As the UN Peacebuilding Commission begins to plan it work, it is important to consider how to deal with ‘spoilers’ as a threat to security: groups that actively seek to hinder or undermine conflict settlement. This paper takes a broad approach to the concept of spoiling and considers a wide range of actors as potential spoilers: not only rebel groups and insurgents, but also diasporas, governments and other entities. The authors demonstrate that imposed or ill-conceived peace processes can sow the seeds of spoiling, but that spoiler violence does not necessarily indicate that a peace process is doomed to failure.     

Patterns of Peace

Different strategies are used to conceptualise peace in the literature on International Relations, peace and conflict studies. These have included strategies based upon the notion that peace is geographically contained, and constructed by race, identity, ideology, or power, and has universal qualities, although it is also utopian and unlikely to be fully achieved. What has developed more recently in the relevant literature is a hybrid version of peace—the liberal peace. This is universal, attainable, and dependent upon a specific methodology. The following essay outlines the main discursive characteristics associated with peace, and with the emergence of the concept of the liberal peace. It outlines the patterns of thought prevalent in the conceptualisation of peace, and their ontological and epistemological implications in the context of the liberal peace framework.     

Women Aren t Behind Men as Breadwinners

"Man earns the bread while woman does housekeeping."This was a long-standing tradition in China.Since liberation, with the promotion of "equality of man and woman,"     

欠发达地区困难职工群体问题及其破解对策——基于县级工会的研究视域

工会破解困难职工难题的前期成效主要集中体现在中心维权帮扶体系的建立健全和规范运作上。根据2008年全国工会帮扶工作会议的"四个新"要求,应着力构筑物质帮扶与精神帮扶同步、输血帮扶与造血帮扶并举、即期帮扶与长远帮扶兼顾、政策帮扶与物质帮扶结合、工会帮扶与社会帮扶共存的工作格局,努力形成帮扶机构多层次,资金来源多渠道,帮扶形式多样化,帮扶工作经常化、制度化、社会化,管理服务网络化、规范化、社区化、人性化的工会帮扶制度体系。     

当下知识分子的品格与担当

中国传统知识分子以忧国忧民而著称,追求正义、热爱真理,具有强烈的社会责任感,被认为是社会的良知。近些年来,知识分子却因为缺少人文情怀,缺少社会关怀,缺少责任意识,缺少道德自律,而日渐受到批评与责难。作为社会良知和理性的代表,知识分子必须独立于利益之外,关注社会、关注人生,具有强烈的社会关怀和社会责任感。