Analyses
While partisan commemoration can certainly “harden boundaries” between hostile groups, its potent symbolic resources can also be adapted to maintain community cohesion, legitimize shifts to peaceful politics by providing ideological continuity, and signal a newfound openness to previous adversaries, all in the service of peace.
La paz desobediente trata acerca de desarrollar colectivamente conocimiento por medio de la reflexión y la acción, poniendo en tela de juicio algunos supuestos aceptados tácitamente sobre un orden social complejo y la obediencia a la autoridad, y fortaleciendo una identidad moral y planes de acción para desobedecer las órdenes sociales inhumanas.
Disobedient peace is about developing knowledge collectively through reflection and action, questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about a complex social order and obedience to authority, and developing a moral identity and action plans to disobey inhumane social orders.
Three central mechanisms help explain the turn to violent resistance: emotional mechanisms (fear and anger as motivation for self-defense and revenge, respectively), material mechanisms (“the availability of weapons”), and practice mechanisms (“previous experience, training, and organizational capabilities in violence”).
National governments, particularly in the Global North, emphasize the militarization of national borders to prevent climate refugees over policies—like reducing carbon emissions—that would actually address the security threat posed by climate change itself.
Lack of local ownership and elite interference in the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) and International Criminal Court (ICC) transitional justice initiatives constrained the peacebuilding agenda because victims of electoral violence were not able to achieve justice, a critical element of reconciliation.
Youth organizations are particularly capable of positively contributing to peace because of their varied conceptualizations of peace, which foster multidimensional approaches to peacebuilding, and their ability to integrate indigenous knowledge into their conflict resolution efforts.
Business-peace initiatives can be successful: 64% of respondents reported improved social fabric in their community, and 80% identified at least one positive economic outcome of the project.
INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS: Working Together (or Not) in Peacebuilding and Civilian Crisis Response
EU, UN, and OSCE civilian missions could do much more to fully capitalize on the potential for “synergy” in their work, through more systematic exchange of capabilities like staff, mission support, equipment, funding, or political and diplomatic support.
Women comprised less than a quarter of the Afghan religious peacebuilders network examined, and most of them were engaged in peacebuilding work focused on education, including teaching peace and conflict resolution from an Islamic perspective or raising awareness in their spheres of influence about what Islamic sacred texts say about peace.