Comparing Peace Processes (Routledge Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution)

by Alpaslan Ozerdem (Editor), RogerMacGinty (Editor), Alpaslan Ozerdem (Editor), Alpaslan Özerdem (Editor), Roger Mac Ginty (Editor)

• New

  Hardcover
  2019

  $158.24

  This book is a state-of-the-art exmaination of contemporary peace processes and negotiated outcomes to civil wars.

  While there is an understandable scholarly, media and policy focus on attempts to end conflict using violence (for example, drone strikes), there are a number of on-going significant peace processes. This volume is a timely case study-led volume, in which each chapter follows a set structure that maximises comparability. The cases are both topical and from recent history, and span the major regions of the world, and have been chosen so that the full range of peace process issues are covered. A structured multi-case comparison gives the opportunity to show what has worked/not worked in some cases, and to explain why this has been the case. As each chapter in this book has a similar structure and will address similar issues, the opportunities for comparison are maximised. All case study chapters end with links to key documents and recommendations for further reading.

  Running through the volume is the issue of how armed non-state groups and governments (and sometimes international actors) have managed to lower the costs of their conflict. We see peace processes as often resembling conflict by other means, in which parties might hold `devious objectives' and may wish to achieve strategic advantage under the guise of `peace'. This circumspection about true motives aside, peace processes have the potential to be transformational in ceasing direct violence, freeing up immense material and emotional resources directed towards violence, ushering in new constitutions, boundary changes and relationships between peoples, governments and civil society actors. We are convinced by Brewer's arguments on the need to see the sociological aspects of peace processes, as well as their political and constitutional aspects. As a result, we see peace processes as more than what happens outside of the negotiating chamber or government/militant group leadership elites. Peace processes have the potential to have a full-spectrum impact: economic, social, and cultural as well as security, political and constitutional.

  This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.