Around the world, every day, women work on building peace in their communities. Through various roles, paid and unpaid, women’s community care work is significant to the lives of individuals, families, communities, and the women themselves. Understandings of peace are varied, and often nuanced to the context and experience of who is defining peace. How women define peace will...
This paper applies corpus linguistic discourse analysis to approach the social media discourse of a recent political movement in Iran, known as #WomanLifeFreedom and Mahsa Amini. The movement included vast protests in different parts of Iran and went viral on an international scale. Protesters relied heavily on social media, particularly Twitter, to determine strategies and...
The management of the herdsmen-farmers conflict-induced internal displacement in Nigeria was characterised by remote factors that affected the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons (IDPs). This qualitative study was conducted on 12 participants comprising humanitarian workers, IDPs, and lawmakers who were conversant with the persistent herdsmen-farmers...
In the last decade we have witnessed rising protests in the United States associated with issues that form part of society’s social fabric that can either facilitate or break down collective behaviour. Rising social inequalities can cause people to no longer share the same values and force individuals to work against each other. This breakdown in social capital can be a key...
Intractable conflicts like the longstanding one between Israel and Palestine have the social psychological effect of exacerbating and enshrining negative inter-group dynamics (Bar-Tal, 2007; 2013). In these conflicts the welfare, status, power, and resources of the in and out-groups can seem directly at odds with each other (Brewer, 2001) leading to dehumanization, violence, and...
This article analyzes how different civil society actors in Colombia used civil resistance to influence the peace process between the government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) between 2010 and 2021, thereby contributing to a recent research agenda on civil resistance and peace processes. Drawing on interviews and documentary analysis, we examine how social actors employed...
Recent studies of the Colombian conflict have shown that struggle for resource accumulation and territorial control, in a very competitive and violent environment in which the illegal armed groups are involved, is crucial to their survival and development. Here, we applied a highly successful methodology from ecology (Ecological Niche Modelling) to the problem of identifying the...
Members of the Northern Ireland’s grassroots peace practitioner community have sustained their careers-long dedication to constructive local engagement across the deep historical divide throughout the decades of The Troubles, the post-agreement era, and up to the present. An exploration of their development as individual practitioners and as a community of practice will...
This paper examines the difficulties that a network of Indigenous women in Mexico deal with when they seek peace for their people under a hybrid political structure. This paper discusses some distinctive aspects of the politics that these women engage in, how they conceive their political ideas, and how they use these ideas to structurally transform the colonial relationship that...
Peace and education are inseparable. Grounding on the aforementioned premise, peace education has become part of the curriculum in a number of countries including the Philippines. Along with the inclusion of peace education was the challenge of how to provide responsive and meaningful learning experiences in peace education. This article discusses the attempt of the use of...
In Colombia, Transitional Justice (TJ) institutions were established after years of violent conflict as part of the 2016 peace agreement between the FARC and the Colombian government. By analysing the posting behaviour of the government-appointed TJ institutions on Facebook, we show how general TJ aims and opportunities for citizen participation were promoted in 2019. Our...
Recent scholarship suggests that norms of nonviolent contestation strongly constrain the course of civil resistance campaigns. However, these norms are not uniform across countries. It may be the case that violent campaign groups may successfully mobilize supporters in societies where norms of nonviolent contestation are not established. This study seeks to answer whether...
Trust is a fundamental element of human relations, facilitating positive cooperation among individuals, groups, and organizations, including those dedicated to peacebuilding. While these organizations ideally collaborate toward their shared goals, interorganizational competition often undermines relationships, breeding distrust. Cultivating interorganizational trust can make the...
Broadening the definition of conflict defines more comprehensively the condition of peace, focusing on how unresolved shared disagreements can lead to, or avoid, polarization and violence. The line between general disagreement and violent conflict lies in the adjustment of shared preferences. Matters like reproductive rights, medically assisted death, race and gender...
By Neil Katz, Published on 12/17/23
While Northern Ireland is still recovering from the violent legacy of the 30-year Troubles during a global COVID-19 pandemic, people still experience violence daily. Economic and political inequalities heighten intergroup tensions and insecurity contributing to the promotion of destructive stories. Brexit has escalated the culture wars between the Protestant Unionist Loyalist and...
Conflict, and violence related events have been found to have significant effects on the cognitive thinking and mental well-being of individuals. Although there is ample evidence suggesting negative association of conflict with schooling outcomes, there is non-existent research on how violence can impact degree choices made by students at the university level. By using university...
Discourse analysis and the theories of war and peace journalism are used to investigate the newspaper coverage of the Pulwama attack of 2019, a recent development in the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan that brought the nuclear-armed Asian neighbours on the brink of a war. To identify the journalistic discourses of the Pulwama attack, 686 headlines of news articles...
The subfield of food and eating practices has registered a significant volume of theoretical and empirical studies. However, there is very limited research targeting non-state armed groups. This article contributes to understanding the nuanced role of food and eating practices (or commensality) in conflict, and its significance in the construction and sustenance of sense of...
This article explores the failure of top-level interventions in the resolution of local conflicts and the role of local agency in peacebuilding. The article relied primarily on qualitative techniques and instruments to collect data to examine why top-level interventions by successive governments have failed to resolve the Bawku chieftaincy conflict. The article finds that top...
The field of Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) was launched in the mid-twentieth century with revolutionary aspirations for explaining, describing and understanding protracted violent conflicts. The field’s architects called for inquiry into the “whole person” of conflict actors that required inquiry into the social, psychological and political spheres of their lives. But the...
Many scholars have discussed the complexities of teaching and learning about past conflicts. However, teaching history during ongoing war and occupation is even more difficult and controversial. This paper posits teachers as agents of peacebuilding, influencing how their students come to understand dynamics of conflict, violence, and peace The aim of this paper is to describe a...
Recent years have witnessed an increasing focus on water as a source of explicit and implicit conflicts. Water-related conflicts are partly attributed to water mismanagement that escalates water stress and conflicts. Despite this development, our current knowledge on local water conflicts within the context of water policy reforms in developing countries is limited. Given the...
The academic field of peace studies suffers from a lack of ontological clarity, with peace researchers widely disagreeing on how to define “peace.” This internal incoherence has far-reaching implications for peace study’s scope, theories, and methodologies, and by extension, for peace practice in general. This article explores the possibility that at least part of this...
Peacebuilding used to power humanity’s quest for fusion; it still could. This article analyses the enormous implications of a burning plasma fusion breakthrough, for both worsening conflicts and peacebuilding, by applying the nonkilling global political science peacebuilding framework; the quintuple helix technology innovation ecosystem model; and recent path dependence theory...