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This chapter argues that peacebuilding operations cannot fulfill their potential and achieve justpeace without “strategic” planning and implementation. The authors employ vignettes from Mozambique, Colombia, and the Philippines to illustrate the current challenges of conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The multiplicity of peacebuilding actors and increasing interaction between the local and global point to the need for strategic responses to conflict. The authors sketch the contours of a theory of strategic peacebuilding, arguing that it includes a confluence of disciplines, practices and expertise that is intended to promote social change and healing that would not naturally occur. They propose principles of strategic peacebuilding and offer practical suggestions for peacebuilding practitioners.

This chapter focuses on the importance of ethnic identity change for conflict transformation. The author asserts that collective identity is malleable, constructed in interaction with other social actors, and subject to incremental change. Those who sponsor the display of group symbols and rituals are situated to introduce new ideas and shift group boundaries. However, such change is limited by structural circumstances, strategic imperatives, and the social psychological needs of group members. Fortunately, the shift in Northern Ireland’s conflict toward nonviolent political persuasion provides opportunities for unionists and loyalists to reflect on their priorities, articulate their goals and identities, and thereby develop a sense of empowerment that is conducive to the development of a multicultural society.

This chapter introduces the social psychology of ethnic and political division in Northern Ireland, documents continuing segregation and division since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, and calls for culturally oriented conflict transformation. Many of the circumstances on which unionists and loyalists based their political assumptions and the institutions on which they relied have changed significantly. Feelings of disorientation and alienation persist. With the end of Direct Rule, political persuasion, lobbying, public relations, and grassroots organizing have become increasingly important, and it is critical that unionists, and particularly working-class loyalists, feel empowered and have the organizing capacity to influence democratic politics without violence.

This chapter examines the potentials for cultural traditions or heritage work to contribute to conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. The construction of memory and identity are closely related and must be considered in any assessment of collective identity change. The Orange Order, bands, and amateur historical and cultural organizations, among others, have developed programs that focus on histories of Protestant experience including origin myths, migration, industry, military battles, and political struggles. Such programs constitute a form of single-identity work that runs risks of generating division and prejudices. However, they can also build confidence and provide grounds for cross-community dialogue and the development of more diverse, sophisticated, and shared historical narratives and identities. Interview data reveal instances of reframing Protestant, unionist, and loyalist collective memory that counter zero-sum mentalities.

This chapter describes how a restorative process called community conferencing combined with a traditional community organizing effort transformed a neighborhood. The strengths and limitations of community conferencing are explored. The case study involves a seemingly intractable conflict involving football playing in a Baltimore neighborhood. The conflict which is described in the chapter led to a community conference that led to the creation of a football league and ultimately the transformation of a neighborhood. The chapter covers the history, principles, and practice skills associated with community conferencing. It suggests that community conferencing can be an important tool for addressing a conflict and is a very strong complement to traditional community practice interventions. The chapter further purports that community conferencing can be an effective strategy to support the development of collective efficacy, a condition that has been found to reduce crime, as neighbors know each other, share values, and are willing to intervene in neighborhood problems.

This chapter exposes the weakness of the churches in their approach to peacemaking. The authors illuminate the fractures within the churches, with many clerics disagreeing on how to bring about peace. Frustration with official policy led some to go it alone in secret. Criticism is made of the institutional church, in the form of church hierarchies and leadership, which were slow to react, minimalist in their efforts and ready to deny involvement. Religious peacebuilding was left to individual churchmen and women, independents and mavericks. This approach is called individualization, allowing the churches as institutions to remain unchallenged by the sectarian conflict. The authors go to great lengths to demonstrate that what churches really wanted was conflict transformation rather than social transformation, negative rather than positive peace, in order to be able to reproduce themselves as collective religions.

This chapter explores dimensions of identity conflicts in Africa and dilemmas of external intervention in such conflicts. Poverty is key to understanding conflict in the region, but in the context of weak development class and ethnicity are often conflated, and mobilization around ethnic markers offers the greatest utility in organizing groups to compete for resources. The potential for violence is related to such variables as the degree of heterogeneity in a society; high-frustration/high-threat scenarios; a history of violence in intergroup relations; the evolution of cultures of impunity; and leadership choices in mobilizing societal groups. External parties face dilemmas in the legalities of intervention in intrastate conflicts; in coordinating action among themselves; in achieving legitimacy with those directly and indirectly involved in the conflict; in resourcing or championing various types of intervention; in the timing of interventions; in assisting parties in conflict to design social and political systems to reduce and more effectively manage identity conflicts; and in dealing with those parties that are more interested in perpetuating a conflict than in resolving it. Many African conflicts demand a systemic, developmentally oriented approach with long-term vision and carefully designed systems of justice and reconciliation with grassroots resonance if a sustainable peace is to be achieved and levels of violence reduced.

The European Union considers conflict resolution as a cardinal objective of its foreign policy. It uses a number of policy instruments to promote this objective, some of which affect conflict conditions and incentives at the micro level. Specifically, the EU has recognized the importance of engaging with civil society in situations of violent conflict, but needs to engage more with local civil society to make its policies more effective. This chapter provides an analytical framework to assess whether and how local civil society actors play a role in conflict and conflict resolution and explores how the EU might influence conflicts through its engagement with civil society by setting out three broad and possibly overlapping hypotheses: the liberal peace paradigm, the Gramscian critique, and the disembedded civil society critique.

Orange Order parades provide another opportunity to observe the slow reinterpretation of collective identities through the incremental modification of collective activities. The leadership of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland has developed a range of public relations programs designed to build its cultural and political capital. Public engagement and persuasion have come to replace the order’s reliance on majoritarian politics and British privilege, reflecting the broader transformation of Northern Ireland’s conflict. The chapter uses the emerging Orange strategy and other initiatives developed by unionists and loyalists to adapt and expand Todd’s classification of types of change in collective identity categories. The author’s scheme captures strategies of identification and dissonance that may emerge as new cultural practices are developed in response to new social and political circumstances.

Chapter 5 takes a different direction to the rest of the book by considering positive transformation in protracted conflicts. Theoretically informative cases of peace transformation are those which initially demonstrated high levels of entrenched ethnocentric framing, majority nationalist mobilization and human rights violations yet actors have nonetheless managed to catalyze a process of transformation. The chapter focuses on four examples of partial transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean region namely the Macedonian name dispute (i.e. the 1995 Interim Agreement), the 1999-earthquake diplomacy between Greece and Turkey; the ‘democratic opening’ of the AKP government in Turkey and finally successful confidence building measures in Cyprus. It argues that intelligently designed and mediated institutional frameworks could neutralize the impact of ethnonationalist frames or co-exist with them in a stable symbiotic relationship, allowing ethnic communities to adapt narratives at their own pace and in their preferred direction as the peace process evolves.

The introduction highlights how conflict transformation is a largely misunderstood concept within the broadly defined field of conflict management and how transformation through social and economic development is even less understood, reflected in the theoretical and practitioner discourse. The chapter is therefore concerned with providing greater conceptual and theoretical clarification, while seeking to examine the practical and policy lessons from the Northern Ireland and Border Counties case study and their consequent impacts and implications for practice, with the aim of making a number of practice and policy recommendations for other regions emerging from violent conflict. In the context of this case study, it introduces a number of conflict transformation funding programmes which have been operating in this region since 1986, facilitating transformation specifically through social and economic development: the International Fund for Ireland, Peace I, II and III and INTERREG I, II and IIIA. They have been responsible for a huge increase in practice, particularly at the grassroots level, prompting previously unforeseen levels of citizen empowerment and local ownership of the peace process. Having enabled significant levels of learning to take place, they provide a suitable context for exploring conflict transformation in action, presenting a case ripe for lesson sharing.

This introductory chapter examines the fit between social work and restorative justice. It explores areas of convergence and tensions between the two disciplines, and argues that by sharing knowledge and interdisciplinary collaboration efforts to support wellbeing, justice, and conflict transformation can be strengthened. It further explains the unique structure of the book which was designed to enhance knowledge and collaboration. The first few chapters serve as basic overviews to social work and restorative justice, but the bulk of the chapters are practice chapters that explore restorative justice practices in traditional social setting such as schools and child welfare settings. These chapters are coauthored by a social worker and a restorative justice practitioner. Each chapter includes theoretical discussions, a case study, skill building, and critical analysis.

The concluding chapter reiterates the main foci of the book: the importance to conflict transformation of incremental identity change initiated from within unionist and loyalist organizations as they modify practices that have long served to perform and define their collective identities. The author acknowledges that the processes described in the book can be slow, and there will likely be different expectations across Northern Ireland about the strategies that organizations, such as the Orange Order or loyalist paramilitaries, develop as well as their ability to advance justice, inclusion, and civil society. Ultimately, it is the long-term impact on cross-community relations of persuasion replacing violence, empowerment overcoming fear, and the development of a less contentious symbolic landscape that, regardless of the political status of the region, will determine whether conflict in Northern Ireland has been transformed and made more constructive.

This chapter explores post-conflict attitudes and behaviour of those former non-state combatants in Northern Ireland who have engaged in broader formations of social and political reconciliation and transformation through various post-prison and community initiatives. It examines how the influx of former prisoners into organisations such as Sinn Féin, the Progressive Unionist Party, and the Ulster Political Research Group has reshaped the political thinking of those groups, and whether former prisoners have been able to maintain a distinct standpoint within such organisations or have been marginalised by leadership-driven change. The chapter also considers contemporary reconstructions of ‘the other’ and whether, and to what extent, these have changed in the post-conflict era. Despite visible efforts to build inter-community linkages, it is also important to consider the ideological and discursive divisions that remain between loyalists and republicans. Central to the processes of conflict transformation are the effects of social cohesion on the broader civil society.

This chapter highlights the importance of bridging gaps among the various disciplines and fields of peace research, religious studies, and political theory. This multidisciplinary approach enriches the theory and practice of conflict transformation as a process that involves reimagining the boundaries of “who we are.” The chapter discusses the interrelated concepts of conflict transformation and peacebuilding in peace studies, the utility and limitations of normative political theory⁉s conceptions of political justice, and the conceptual insights of religious studies.

This chapter explores the peacebuilding policy of the Irish and British governments. The difficulties that must be avoided by a new policy framework are inter alia theoretical misunderstandings and definitional and conceptual confusion, overlooking the root causes of the conflict, overly complex delivery structures, excessive bureaucracy, gap funding periods, listening to and involving civil society, enabling accessibility and, critically, sustainability issues. Finding the right policy framework needs serious consideration if conflict transformation efforts to date are to be sustained and other regions are to learn from this experience. The resultant implications show that it is not realistic to expect conflict transformation tools such as the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) or the Peace programmes to resolve the problems resulting from prolonged conflict. Conflict transformation can be a successful if it is sustained over the long term.

The contribution of paramilitary prisoners to conflict transformation remains a surprisingly under-stated aspect of the Northern Ireland peace process. Former prisoners have utilised the organisational capacity and structures of paramilitary groups and developed these as agents of conflict transformation. ‘Management systems’ and structures evidently mobilised to engage in violence were reoriented towards developing positive community roles in respect of restorative justice, opposition to violence and reducing sectarian tensions at interfaces. Concurrently, former prisoners and their representative groups have developed client relations with the local state, in the search for funding for local conflict transformation and reconciliation projects. These radical developments have been facilitated by dialogue initiated by former prisoners, on an inter-communal basis through meetings with former prisoners on the opposing side and via intra-group dialogue. A combination of tactical flexibility, societal change, perceptions of victory or continuing change and outworking of the longstanding recognition of the limited utility of violence contributed to ceasefires and concentration upon politics.

This chapter explores peacebuilding initiatives launched at the grassroots level by loyalists in the 2000s. It also examines their effect on the community, as well as their strengths and weaknessses. The examples of Ulster Defence Association (UDA)'s and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)'s engagement in peacebuilding revealed that it is the rapprochement between loyalist paramilitary leaders and community activists that has enabled the former to engage in a ‘structural’ process to modify their modes of action and organisation. The East Antrim Conflict Transformation Forum (EACTF) addressed local needs impacting loyalist communities. The Standing Northern Ireland Peacebuilding Process (SNIPP) tried to end the sectarian conflict and its causes. As tools for change, EACTF and SNIPP could be considered as overoptimistic and dismissed as utopian. Generally speaking, the study of the loyalist peace initiatives elucidates some of the main shortcomings of the policy-making and peacebuilding frameworks in Northern Ireland.