Insurgency and Peace Building in the Northeast Indian State of Manipur

This article looks at the ongoing insurgency in the remote Indian northeast, and has a special focus on the state of Manipur. Manipur is regarded as India’s eastern most state, and is geographically sandwiched in between East Asia proper and South Asia proper. This article tries to analyze the different facets of this very complex situation, and pays special attention to how the conflict has changed its character with the passage of time. For purposes of this article, primary data was collected by interviewing local people of Manipuri descent in eastern India to get first hand information about the conflict. Finally, at the end of the article, methods of peace building have been suggested as the way forward.     

UNSC Resolution 1325 national action plans in Liberia and Sierra Leone: An analysis of gendered power relations in hybrid peacebuilding

This paper considers how the use of ‘hybridity’ in the peacebuilding literature overlooks the gendered dimensions of hybrid interactions. It does so by examining the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 national action plans (NAPs) for Liberia and Sierra Leone. By asking the gendered questions of ‘who participates?’ and ‘how do they participate?’ it draws from Mac Ginty’s conception of hybridity and traces the compliance and incentivizing power in hybridized peace, as well as the ability of local actors to resist and provide alternatives. However, Mac Ginty’s model is found to be inadequate because of its inattention to the gendered nature of power. It is found that with a gendered approach to hybridity, it is easier to trace the processes of hybridization of NAPs in post-conflict states where their implementation is limited. In asking the questions of ‘who’ and ‘how’, three conclusions about the gendered nature of hybrid peacebuilding are drawn: international intervention relies upon the ‘feminization’ of local actors; issues framed within the realm of the ‘masculine’ are more likely to get attention; and the Resolution 1325 agenda in post-conflict states can be subverted by framing it as a ‘soft’ issue.     

Learning and the Precision of International Investment Agreements

The international regime for the promotion and protection of foreign investment consists of a multitude of close to 3,000 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and related international investment agreements (IIAs). Yet, despite a growing body of research on IIAs, scholars in political economy have paid little attention to the legal language in the treaties themselves. In this research note, we draw on the conceptual apparatus of the legalization literature and focus on legal precision in BITs. We use a new data set created through quantitative text analysis to develop an index measuring legal precision. We then investigate the causes of the pronounced increase in precision in BITs and the considerable variation across treaties. We argue that capital-exporting countries are the primary drivers of change, and that they are motivated because they learn the implications of existing legal language from two sources: First, from the growing number of arbitration proceedings, and second, when they themselves are targeted by such claims. We provide statistical tests of our hypotheses and find ample support.     

Understanding conflict resolution philosophically in a school setting: three different kinds of violence and dialogue

According to Galtung, violence can be divided into two kinds: (i) direct violence, which is always physical in a wider sense (e.g. bodily harm or verbal abuse) or (ii) indirect violence that is either structural (i.e. the institution is structurally violent because it is organised so to privilege a group over others; e.g. a strict pyramidal organisational structure) or cultural (i.e. the institution is culturally violent because it encourages or fails to deal with cultural aspects that either privileges or is demeaning towards certain groups; e.g. institutionalised racism or misogyny). Galtung’s theory provides us with three levels of violence, leading us to three different potential forms of conflict. In response to this, I propose a philosophical discussion centred on three distinct kinds of dialogue, each of which explaining forms of conflict resolution dealing with these three kinds of violence identified by Galtung. That is, Buber’s, Levinas’ and Arendt’s conceptions of dialogue, dealing, respectively, with physical, cultural and structural violence. Given that violence has become a growing problem within the education context and that various strategies of conflict resolution have been tried and are being pursued, my discussion will enable those involved in these ventures to gain a better understanding of the problem and of its possible solutions.     

Teachers’ nascent praxes of care: potentially decolonizing approaches to school violence in Trinidad

Zero tolerance, punitive, and more negative peace-oriented approaches dominate school violence interventions, despite research indicating that comprehensive approaches are more sustainable. In this article, I use data from a longitudinal case study at a Trinidadian secondary school to focus on the role of teachers and their impact on school violence; I show that institutional constraints are not fully deterministic, as teachers sometimes deploy their agency to efficacious ends. In combining Noddings’ postulations on care and Freire’s notions of praxis as a symbiosis of reflection and action, I explicate the nascent praxes of care of six teachers at this school, as they strive for more positive peace-oriented approaches to school violence. I characterize these praxes as nascent because they are not fully interrogative of the structural violence of the entire system. However, I do argue that these nascent praxes possess decolonizing and transgressive potentiality in the face of a logic of coloniality that reinforces hierarchy, exclusion, and marginalization in the Trinidadian educational system. I conclude by contending that these nascent praxes must be scaled-up to more mature, radical praxes, including the cultivation of a systemic praxis of care; in other words, a deeper and broader postcolonial peace education.     

20世纪初韩国的和平思想——日本的“东洋和平论”批判和韩中日间合作的探索

20世纪初期,在日本帝国主义进行侵略和扩张的过程中,伊藤博文政府为了建立"东洋和平"和西方势力抗衡,主张在韩中日之间开展合作。但事实上这种主张不过是把当时以日本为中心的东北亚地区秩序合法化的说辞。针对这一点,安重根、安昌浩、申采浩等韩国独立运动家指出国家正处于丧失国权的危机之中,在对日本主张的"东洋和平"进行批判的同时,强调只有在韩国等周边国家的独立得到保障的情况下才有可能实现真正意义上的"东洋和平"。1910年日本帝国主义强行合并韩国以后,申采浩、朴殷植等韩国独立运动家在指出日本合并韩国的非法性的同时,还强调韩中日等东北亚地区国家间建立在信任基础上的交流和合作的重要性,主张韩国的独立有利于"东洋和平与世界和平"。尤其值得一提的是,柳麟锡在强调韩中关系在东北亚的重要性及中国作用的同时,还提出了韩中日三国在相互信任的基础上朝着共生关系发展的构想。     

State fragility and failure as wicked problems: beyond naming and taming

Conceptualising state fragility and failure as a wicked problem set reveals the complex, ill-defined and interdependent nature of the reality behind these labels. This essay builds on the contributions to this special issue by examining why the fragile/failed state concept remains in good currency despite its analytic weaknesses. The discussion reveals that the parsing of state fragility into its component parts and the development of related indicators reflect efforts to tame the wickedness of the problem set; this has led to peace-building and state-building interventions whose plans and actions do not effectively take account of what is necessary to achieve their intended aims. A better problem-solving match would look beyond naming and taming, incorporating lessons from the implementation literature and international development practice. However, achieving this would depend upon the political will of both labellers and the labelled.     

Corruption in the aftermath of war: an introduction

‘Corruption in the aftermath of war’ brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to enquire into the dynamics of corruption in post-conflict societies. This introduction discusses five themes, problematising and summarising key findings from the 10 articles included. First, we discuss the problems with the corruption concept, related to its moralising connotations and definitional vagueness, and propose viewing corruption as a collective action dilemma as a way of avoiding these moralising aspects. Second, we discuss post-conflict societies, and highlight the great varieties of ‘peace’ that that label can refer to. We suggest that the causes, dynamics and effects of corruption in post-conflict societies bear many similarities with those in other societies, but that the post-conflict situation often generates an intensification and entrenchment of corruption-related problems. Third, we analyse the dynamics between international interveners and domestic actors, and show the contradictions and tensions in international–domestic relations. Fourth, we argue that the inter-linkages between inequality, mistrust and corruption deserve consideration in the study of post-conflict societies, and that inequality in particular merits more attention. Finally, we discuss some methodological challenges encountered by the contributors in their studies of corruption in post-conflict societies.     

Higher education and peacebuilding – a bridge between communities?

As the Syrian civil war enters its fifth year, with over four million refugees and no solution in the near future, the international community must better consider long-term planning in regards to the plight of refugees and services to support them, not just short-term emergency responses. Critically, higher education is all too often ignored when addressing refugee crises, pushed aside in favor of primary education, and effectively disempowering those best suited to eventually rebuild and reconstruct after war’s end. This paper examines the often less considered aspect of refugee access to higher education, using Duhok, located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as a case study, and hypothesizing that refugees’ inclusion in Duhok’s local higher education system can serve as an invaluable peacebuilding tool, bridging host and refugee communities, while empowering refugees to promote peacebuilding and development. We chose to focus on higher education because we agree with the idea espoused by Watenpaugh, Fricke, and Siegel that ‘university graduates … include Syria’s brightest and most ambitious young people … the human capital that will be critical to the rebuilding of Syrian society after the conflict has ended’. This study investigates Duhok area residents’ perceptions of the Syrian refugee crisis and the refugee population, refugees’ attitudes toward the host community and higher education, and personal views regarding intergroup relationships and the role of higher education, drawing primarily on field research conducted in 2013. Approached as a qualitative study, field research was conducted by a two-person team, with members representing the University of Duhok and New York University, and with the aim of actively working with research participants in the hopes of generating policy-related and practical recommendations.     

Passing on the history of ‘comfort women’: the experiences of a women’s museum in Japan

This article explores the activities and experiences of a women’s peace museum in Japan which especially tries to pass on the history of Japan’s military sexual slavery, or the ‘comfort women’ issue. The system of Japan’s military sexual slavery had not been written as a part of history until courageous survivors testified and documentary evidence was unearthed in the 1990s. With few material exhibits of sexual violence, testimonies play a significant role in the exhibitions. Panels displaying the testimony of both survivors and former soldiers try to represent the person as a whole, situating sexual enslavement or crimes as part of their overall life, rather than extracting the harsh experience in an isolated way. The concrete and detailed activities of this privately run museum show the challenges faced by museums dealing with the dark history of their own country.