Whither peacebuilding? A reflection on post-conflict African experiences

Peacebuilding is a key concept in efforts to reconstruct African states emerging from conflicts. At heart, it captures the whole array of activities associated with state-and nation-building in addition to building the foundations for local ownership of these processes. Popularised by the UN Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali in the early 1990s, peacebuilding has evolved alongside peacemaking and peacekeeping in the reconstruction repertoire. This article suggests that while there is considerable scepticism about the utility of peacebuilding in contemporary conflict resolution efforts, African experiences have, since the 1990s, provided solid lessons to both local and international actors on how to rebuild states, societies, polities, and economies.     

Voices

正"Developing countries need to take the primary responsibility for national development.At the same time,the international community should help developing countries to build capacity,put in place a fair,equitable,inclusive and well-organized international economic and i nancial order and enable developing countries to make full use of their resources endowment,take an active part in the global value chain and cultivate a competitive edge in the course of opening-up so that they will benei t from globalization."     

在推进包容文化的发展中实现社会主义文化大发展大繁荣

当前,世界趋向多极化,经济快速发展使全球化更加深入,各种文明之间的交融、交流和交锋也日趋频繁,包容文化正是在这种环境下提出的一种科学、可行的文化生成模式。只有立足于发展包容文化,才能不断推进文化大发展大繁荣,促进文化和谐,为建设和谐世界创造文化条件。     

Substance Abuse and Social Deviance:

The authors discuss adolescent substance abuse as a manifestation of social deviance. Theories of adolescent deviance are reviewed in light of their contributions to understanding troubled youth. A youth assessment framework is developed to provide a systematic means of linking theories to specific treatment strategies.     

Political Sociology of International Interventions: Peacebuilders and the Ground

ABSTRACT

This special issue, instead of questioning what effect peacebuilding interventions have on post-conflict societies, analyses what the ground of intervention does to peacebuilders. It demonstrates that everyday interactions on the ground shape the interveners and even the scope of their missions. We delineate how a political sociology approach might break away from binaries (‘internationals/locals’) and, instead, illuminate processes (of internationalization and localization). We intend to offer a political sociology of the ‘intervention encounter’, that is, to scrutinize the everyday interactions among peacebuilders and between peacebuilders and domestic actors, and to investigate effects of the ground on peacebuilding organizations, doctrines and decision-making processes, as well as on peacebuilders’ trajectories, positions, professional practices and representations. In fine, we explore how peacebuilders’ relations to the ground structure the socio-professional field of peacebuilding.     

Nomadic by nature? Contradictions and precarious work in Mongolian tourism

ABSTRACT

Mongolia's transition to a democratic, market economy has created widespread change, especially among pastoral herders. Pastoralists have been depicted as archaic and independent ‘nomads’ who exist outside the modern economy. Still, pastoral culture is a key asset in tourism products and advertising. Tourism could provide fair economic benefits, but inclusive growth depends on how shareholders participate. Using interviews with tour company employees, I investigate how tour companies incorporate pastoralists into their products. The results demonstrate several barriers to inclusive growth. Companies feel individually responsible for managing tourism assets, and to maintain the guise of pastoral authenticity, they limit pastoralists’ participation in business through informal and contingent work contracts. These contracts reveal problematic asymmetry and give pastoralists little job security, control, or access to employee benefits. These circumstances oppose inclusive growth paradigms and demonstrate elements of precarious work. The shared interest in maintaining pastoral culture may unify this fragmented industry.     

Studying African interventions ‘from below’: Exploring practices,knowledges and perceptions

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a shift in researching African interventions: from a top-down study of African regional norms and institutions towards a view ‘from below’ on the actual practices of intervention and how they play out on the ground. Such a view is important in order to understand the contested politics of African interventions as well as disconnects between grand regional architectures and their imprints on the ground. In doing so, this article also seeks to link research on African interventions to the academic debate on peacebuilding and peacemaking interventions more generally. While this literature has increasingly taken the ‘local’ into account, such a localisation in terms of researching African interventions has yet to take place. This article suggests three dimensions in which a view ‘from below’ could be translated into the research agenda on African interventions.     

Coordinating Transitional Justice

Conflict resolution professionals sometimes differ from human rights professionals about the best approaches to transitional justice, particularly with regard to the scope, conditions, and timing of possible amnesties from prosecution for perpetrators of war crimes and human rights abuses. When human rights and conflict resolution professionals work at cross‐purposes, they may work less effectively to end conflict, abuses, and crimes, and to implement peace accords. A consensus among conflict resolution and human rights scholars about which legal norms should govern post‐conflict amnesty programs appears to be developing. Against this emerging legal framework, human rights and conflict resolution professionals should, I argue, develop processes for working together more effectively in the design and implementation of context‐sensitive approaches to transitional justice. These process principles should address the entire conflict period, from escalation through resolution to post‐conflict reconstruction. In this article, I describe a tentative, general framework for coordinating the development of transitional justice programs. This proposed framework is intended to stimulate and guide discussion of these issues among conflict resolution and human rights professionals and scholars.     

Refugee youth in settlement,schooling, and social action: reviewing current research through a transnational lens

How do refugee youth engage in peacebuilding, civic participation, and social action through their educational experiences? This article draws from transnational frameworks, specifically Ajrun Appadurai’s notion of ‘imagined worlds’ with an emphasis on ethnoscapes as a framework through which to review literature on refugee young peoples’ involvement in peacebuilding, participation, and social action in schools, focusing particularly on experiences from countries of settlement outside of refugee camps. This study examines current literature on refugee youth schooling and social engagement along three main themes: the student, the school, and the wider society. Each section considers the implications of the scholarly literature in a transnational framework, identifying what transnational flows (i.e. people, capital, ideas, media, technology, etc.) and what imagined worlds are reflected in the literature. In conducting this analysis, I aim to dislodge peacebuilding education from spatially fixed contexts of ‘fragility’ that assigns a nation-state as the primary reference point of peace and conflict, to instead examine the transnational nature both of conflict and of the agency that displaced youth can mobilize to transform conflict through peacebuilding.