Confronting Peace: Local Peacebuilding in the Wake of a National Peace Agreement (Rethinking Political Violence)

Most recent works about the efforts of local communities caught up in a civil war have focused on their efforts to remain places of security and safety from the violence that surrounds them—neutral peace communities or zones. This book, in contrast, focuses on local peace communities facing new challenges and opportunities once a peace agreement has been signed at the national level, such as those in South Africa, the Philippines, Burundi, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the present peace process in Colombia between the FARC and the Colombian Government. The communities’ task is to make a stable and durable peace in the aftermath of a violent civil war and a deal on which local people have usually had little or no influence. Such agreements seek to involve them in both short and longer term peace-building, and expect local communities to cope with problems of armed ex-combatants, IDPs and refugees, law and order in the absence of much state presence, high unemployment and the need for widespread and massive reconstruction of physical infrastructure damaged or destroyed during the war. How local communities have coped with the demands of “peace” is thus the theme that runs through each of these individual chapters, written by authors with direct experience of grassroots communities struggling with such “problems of peace.”  

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Susan Allen is Director of the Center for Peacemaking Practice at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, USA, where she is an Associate Professor teaching action research, reflective practice, evaluation and other ways of blending research and practice in the conflict resolution field. Dr. Allen holds an M.S. and Ph.D. from the same institution in Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

Landon Hancock is Professor at Kent State University’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies, USA, and Affiliated Faculty at Kyung Hee University’s Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, South Korea, and the Program for the Prevention of Mass Violence at George Mason University’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, USA. His research focuses the role of ethnicity and identity in conflict generation, dynamics, resolution and post-conflict efforts in transitional justice. This is coupled with an interest in grassroots peacebuilding, zones of peace and the role of agency in the success or failure of peacebuilding efforts. He is co-editor (with Christopher Mitchell) of Zones of Peace (2007), Local Peacebuilding and National Peace (2012) and Local Peacebuilding and Legitimacy (2018).

Christopher Mitchell is Emeritus Professor of Conflict Research at George Mason University’s Carter School, USA. He works on the practical and theoretical aspects of peace making, and has published books and articles on conflict resolution, and on ending asymmetric conflicts. He has recently co-edited three books about grassroots peacebuilding with Landon Hancock, the latest of which, Legitimacy and Local Peace-building [Routledge] was published in Spring 2018. His retrospective text book, The Nature of Intractable Conflict, was published in Spanish as La Naturaleza de los Conflictos Intratables [Edicions Bellaterra] in 2016.

 Cécile Mouly is Research Professor at FLACSO Ecuador and their Coordinator of the research group in Peace and Conflict. She is also a practitioner and as teaches postgraduate courses and practitioner trainings on conflict analysis, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. She is a resource person in “Conflict Prevention: Analysis for Action” for the UN System Staff College and a member of the academic council of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. She currently collaborates with the Colombian truth commission.  Her research focuses on the role of civil society in peacebuilding, peace processes, civil resistance in the context of armed conflict and the social reintegration of former combatants.