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Little raises many questions of international legality in addressing the finer concepts of peace enforcing, peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peace building. He accentuates the rule of law, democracy, and human rights as foundations for each of these stages towards a Just Peace. Looking towards collectively accepted international treaties for a concept of justice, Little taps into a notion of legal validity that is at least partially composed of a legitimacy that emanates from the people themselves. Although there are valid reasons for questioning who has been allowed to participate in the process developing international law, protecting the human rights of all, and labelling it justice certainly does not seem to create an untenable starting point. In fact, this approach that looks to protect the rights of all can be quite constructive because, ultimately, it is the people involved in a conflict who will determine whether a peace is just, and therefore lasting.

The primary international organization involved with refugees is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was established in 1950 to protect and assist refugees and supervise the implementation of the UN refugee treaty regime. In terms of the broader international system, without significant institutional change, increased financial support and renewed commitment on the part of Member States, the UN will not be capable of executing the critical peacekeeping and peace‐building tasks assigned to it in the coming years.

To promote greater coherence in the making and implementing of forced migration policy, a new intellectual capacity is needed. The proposal made by the author is for the establishment of Strategic Humanitarian Action and Research (SHARE), a humanitarian action think tank. SHARE would be both a planning resource and an archive of lessons learned, which ultimately could become an intergovernmental mechanism. It would craft responses to fill the gaps that regularly emerge in post‐crisis situations, particularly in post‐crisis situations when emergency relief is ending, but before the development of a fully functioning state.

Describes the interrelation between security and democratic consolidation as a process in specific national and regional contexts. The analysis combines a systematic approach to hypothesis building with an empirically based discussion, and seeks to place developments in Eastern Europe into a wider analytical framework. The chapter argues that the relationship between security and democracy in Eastern Europe is based on the concept of dual conditionality. The relationship is a reciprocal one in which security conditions democratic development as much as democratic consolidation conditions regional security and peace building. Finally, the chapter discusses several caveats concerning the interrelation between security and democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to develop in Palestine after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, but only a few of these can be considered peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs). P/CRO growth was hindered by the culture of antagonism with Israel, the neopatriarchal structure of Palestinian society and the autocracy of the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli occupation's stifling effect on civil society, and many Palestinians have preferred armed resistance. P/CROs were usually internally democratic; ideology played an important role in success or failure, most relied on international funding, and all either regarded themselves as complementing the Palestinian Authority or monitoring it. P/CRO activities included human rights advocacy, the representation of Palestinian interests to the international community, and domestic consciousness raising. However, the P/CRO contribution to peace building has been insignificant, and the true Palestinian “peace camp” is the Palestinian Authority.

Chapter 8 examines the spike of sexual and gender-based violence in postconflict and peace-building environments. Despite recent UN Security Council resolutions, the invisibility of this violence against women during and after conflict marginalizes women in postconflict state-building and economic reconstruction processes. This economic and political marginalization of women exacerbates violence after conflict and hinders these peace-building efforts. The first part of the chapter applies the political economy approach of the book to reveal how gendered peacekeeping economies exacerbate violence against women. It critiques the prioritization of law and order over social and economic opportunities. The second part examines the role of women in peace-building decision making and economic reconstruction in places as diverse as East Timor; Aceh, Indonesia; Mindanao province in the Philippines; Iraq; Afghanistan; Colombia; Guatemala; the Congo; and Darfur. The chapter concludes by critically assessing two approaches to postconflict prevention of violence against women: the “good practice” of placing women peacekeepers in postconflict zones and the role of reparations in ensuring women's equal access to postconflict development.

This chapter examines the backgrounds of several elite networks and coalitions that were instrumental to establishing independence and, subsequently, peace in the 1990s, focusing on the relationships, configurations of power, and ideas that they drew on and further embedded. Being denied access to significant external funding or support, these networks were largely dependent upon one another for either their survival as elites or for their prosperity. Their mutual dependence reverberates throughout the independence discourse, building layers of meaning around the idea that Somaliland was forged through the self-reliance of its people, which followed on from the self-reliance demonstrated by earlier civil society movements and the Somali National Movement (SNM) guerilla fighters. This framing of history is not only used to illustrate the authenticity of Somaliland’s independence but also the degree to which its experience upends hegemonic assumptions about state fragility and the usefulness of international intervention for correcting it. This chapter thus explores the ways in which the autonomy of local actors is framed as one of the core elements of Somaliland’s peace-building processes.

The ‘rebuilding’ of a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence often subsumes the dynamic requirements of human security into a technical task that belies or fails to fully comprehend the needs of the community being ‘built’. Indeed, as Trudy Fraser in Chapter Ten explains, critics have suggested that ‘building’ in the aftermath of conflict merely serves to impose externally configured normative benchmarks as a panacea for peace, privileging the goals of international actors at the expense of local actors. One of the main problems is that externally configured normative benchmarks do not necessarily conform to local models of peace and security. In order for the ‘building’ to be reflective of the dynamic requirements of human security, this chapter asserts that it must be responsive to the following questions: (1) who is doing the building?; (2) what is being built?; and (3) for whom is it being built? These three questions speak to separate but interrelated issues in the context of modern state-, peace- and nation-building, and highlights the ambiguity that currently exists between the initial (state-security-centric) and subsequent (human-security-centric) phases of intervention and ‘(re-)building’.

International criminal justice has barely engaged with the discipline of criminology, and vice versa. Probably this is because the phenomenon of international crimes is viewed within the field as more a matter of politics than sociology. On the legal side, there is an attempt by some of the lawyers to exclude the social sciences, by reducing prosecution to absolute principles and dismissing the relevance of factors such as peace building, reconciliation, and social reinsertion of offenders. Sometimes this is done in the name of legal rigour and sometimes its proponents invoke the rights of victims as justification. This chapter argues that international criminal law could benefit from greater openness to the social sciences. Criminologists might break some paths here by developing more sophisticated approaches to the specifics of crime when perpetrated in time of conflict, or by brutal regimes.

After considering the critical study of liberal peace, this chapter outlines in detail the foundations and intellectual origins of liberal peace theory. It then moves beyond this literature by introducing a conceptual framework for ‘liberal peace transitions’ that explains both the individual components of liberal peace and the different forms of liberal peace that can be derived from these components. This book examines the nature of the peace created through different aspects of contemporary peacebuilding. It examines the development of the discourse of the liberal peace and compares this evolution with the development of practical approaches for peace, in the context of peacebuilding, the work of international organisations, donors, agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the contributions of key liberal states.

This chapter explores how the EU has worked to anchor the seven Balkan states into the process of European integration. Since 1999, the clear prospect of EU membership has provided a relatively constant set of incentives for elites to pursue strategies of regional peace-building, ethnic tolerance, and economic reform. Before 1999, this prospect was much less clear — and the logic of qualifying for membership certainly failed to overpower domestic forces with very different political agendas in Croatia or Serbia. The prospect of eventual EU membership failed to motivate leaders in many Balkan states to follow a path of reform compatible with joining the EU as rapidly as possible. But it did not fail to motivate all of them.

In this conversation with Catia C. Confortini (former International Vice President), Madeleine Rees (Secretary General) and Joy Onyesoh (International President) reflect on the legacy of and prospects for Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s feminist advocacy on WPS. Drawing on Nigerian and transnational experiences they lament the sidestepping of WILPF’s feminist peace analysis in favor of an agenda co-opted by states and narrow, militarized security interests. At the same time, engagement with the state is not only a necessity, but an opening to transform the global governance system in the direction of feminist peace.

This chapter looks at three projects that are being run by social workers in Sri Lanka to build community robustness, women's engagement and post-conflict cross-community engagement. By focusing on grassroots community building shaped by values of non-violent resistance and social justice, it argues that community social work models have had a significant impact in building cross-community support networks and tackling issues of in-built suspicion and rivalry between the different communities. First, the chapter provides a background to Sri Lankan society and the roots of the conflicts that have shaped the island since independence in 1948. It then discusses issues confronting peace-building initiatives as well as philosophical foundations of social work interventions.

This chapter considers the current political framing of refugee repatriation in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It focuses on recent attempts by the international community to establish a link between refugee repatriation and state building, particularly in post-conflict settings such as South Sudan and Afghanistan. The chapter charts how in this context refugee return is once more being used to reinforce nation-state understandings of citizenship and rights by linking repatriation to peace-building and development, but at the same time how international actors, including UNHCR, are having to adapt and respond to refugees’ continued use of mobility after their repatriation. However, the chapter concludes that despite these innovations, refugee repatriation – particularly to fragile states emerging from decades of civil conflict – is still often driven by host and donor states who are fixated on physical return and securing their own national space, rather than in securing refugees’ liberal freedoms.