Conflict Peace Research Articles

Selfish third parties act as peacemakers by transforming conflicts and promoting cooperation

The tremendous costs of conflict have made humans resourceful not only at warfare but also at peacemaking. Although third parties have acted as peacemakers since the dawn of history, little is known about voluntary, informal third-party intervention in conflict. Here we introduce the Peacemaker Game, a novel experimental paradigm, to model and study the interdependence between disputants and third parties in conflict. In the game, two disputants choose whether to cooperate or compete and a third party chooses whether or not to intervene in the conflict. Intervention introduces side payments that transform the game disputants are playing; it also introduces risk for the third party by making it vulnerable to disputants' choices. Six experiments revealed three robust effects: (i) The mere possibility of third-party intervention significantly increases cooperation in interpersonal and intergroup conflicts; (ii) reducing the risk to third parties dramatically increases intervention rates, to everyone's benefit; and (iii) disputants' cooperation rates are consistently higher than third parties' intervention rates. These findings explain why, how, and when self-interested third parties facilitate peaceful conflict resolution.

Military in Mali: The EU’s Action against Instability in the Sahel Region

The conflict eruption in the Sahel during the last years has provoked new challenges for the European Union's security architecture. Notably the toppling of Libyan long-time leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in summer 2011 negatively affected many countries' stability in the adjacent Sahel region. The EU's 'Strategy for Security and Development in the Sahel' in March 2011 suggested a combination of soft and hard policies to foster stabilization and political progress in line with the 2003 European Security Strategy through a Comprehensive Approach. This article analyses to what extent the EU's actions in the region have indeed contributed to conflict resolution. It evaluates the overall effectiveness of the implementation of the EU's Comprehensive Approach, and underlines five critical aspects that might provoke rather worse than better results in the Sahel. The guiding hypothesis is that the increased use of military means lowers the EU's impact on peaceful conflict resolution in the region, as the lost impartiality hinders its chances for civilian success. The Malian malaise, therefore, poses fundamental questions for the EU's Comprehensive Approach towards security and stability - particularly at times when in Brussels the European Neighbourhood Policy and the European Security Strategy are under thorough review.

La mediación como política social. Una vía eficaz para el logro de la cultura de paz

This research arises as a result of the thesis for obtaining the degree of Doctor, and aims to contribute to the strengthening of a culture of peace in Mexico, by proposing to implement peaceful conflict resolution like mediation strategies, considering it as a social policy that affects the positive transformation of conflicts. The ideal tool, dialogue and values: tolerance, cooperation, active participation of society, solidarity and justice approach to citizenship, will be the essential elements to solve conflicts of the 21st century society in effective, faster, economical and equitable manner. Mediation satisfactorily meets the requirements to be able to be considered a social policy that encourage the active participation of citizens in the solution of their conflicts, helping to undermine the crisis of justice systems.

Conflict networks

Conflict parties are frequently involved in more than one conflict simultaneously. In this paper the structure of local conflicts is modeled as a conflict network where rivals invest in conflict specific technology to attack their respective neighbors. We prove that there exists a unique equilibrium and examine the relation between total conflict investment (a proxy for conflict intensity) and underlying network characteristics. We also identify a class of conflict networks where peaceful conflict resolution is beneficial in the sense that conflict intensity is reduced. Outside of this class peaceful conflict resolution may be detrimental because countervailing local network effects can actually result in higher conflict intensity.

United Nations peacekeeping dynamics and the duration of post-civil conflict peace

How do the qualities of United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) influence the duration of peace after civil wars? Recent work shows that UN peacekeeping extends the duration of peace. However, this work has only been able to assess whether the presence or absence of UN missions affects post-conflict peace processes. Such analyses offer little in the way of policy prescriptions for planning and structuring PKOs to effectively pursue their goals. By employing fine-grained data on the personnel composition of PKOs, and generating expectations from rationalist bargaining models of civil war, we argue that the number and type of personnel deployed to a PKO influence the UN’s ability guarantee peace by addressing the information and commitment problems that so often lead to the collapse of post-conflict peace. We analyze how the composition of missions influences the duration of peace, finding that, as the number of UN military troops deployed increases, the chance of civil war recurring decreases. However, other personnel types do not have the same effect. We conclude that the effectiveness of post-conflict peacekeeping lies in the ability of PKOs to alleviate commitment problems through the deployment of military troops that are able to defend the peace.

La educación física en la consecución de la competencia social y ciudadana (Physical education in the achievement of social and citizen competence)

Este artículo muestra el resultado de una investigación-acción, nacida de la necesidad de cambio del clima de convivencia de un centro de educación primaria de Barcelona. El propósito de la investigación fue dar respuesta a la hipótesis de acción: ¿Como puede contribuir el trabajo de la competencia social y ciudadana a la prevención y resolución pacífica de los conflictos desde el área de Educación Física? Para conseguirlo, una vez recogidos los datos del estado inicial del alumnado, se puso en práctica una estrategia de actuación para las sesiones de tutoría y de Educación Física, desarrollada por el grupo de trabajo participante en los ciclos de investigación-acción, y con objeto de favorecer la adquisición de la competencia social y ciudadana para fomentar la prevención y resolución pacífica de los conflictos. A lo largo de la aplicación se recogieron datos cualitativos y cuantitativos mediante cuestionario y observaciones participantes y sistemáticas. Los datos obtenidos reflejaron como resultados una mejora de los procesos relacionales. Hacia el final de la intervención las respuestas predominantes ante los conflictos fueron o bien ignorar el hecho, o bien el diálogo. En definitiva, se minimizaron las resoluciones que conllevaban violencia y aumentaron significativamente las mediaciones con ayuda de compañeros y el diálogo autónomo. Palabras clave: Educación Física, competencia social y ciudadana, resolución de conflictos, Investigación-acción, convivencia, tutoría.Abstract: This paper covers the results of an action research project stemming from the necessity of change in the climate of coexistence within a primary school in Barcelona. The investigation purpose was to give an answer to this action hypothesis: ¿How can the work of social and citizen competence contribute to the prevention and peaceful resolution of the conflicts from the physical education area? To achieve this, once the initial state of the students data was collected an action strategy for tutoring sessions and physical education was implemented. The strategy was developed by the teachers who participated in the work group with the aim to promote in the pupils the acquisition of skills of social and citizen competence to encourage prevention and peaceful conflict resolution. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected throughout the implementation using questionnaires, participant observation and systematic observation. Improvements of relational processes were shown in the obtained results. Towards the end of the intervention the predominant responses facing conflicts were either ignoring the fact or starting dialogue. As for the conflict resolution, those which entailed violence were minimized and on the other hand peer mediation and autonomous dialogue were significantly increased.Key words: Physical Education, social and civic competence, conflict resolution, action research, coexistence, tutoring.

The effectiveness of treaty design in addressing water disputes

We examine the design features of treaties governing international rivers and empirically test their effectiveness in managing water disputes. We expect peaceful conflict management to be more successful and militarized conflict to be less likely in dyadic river claims when riparians share membership in treaties with mechanisms for river basin organizations, information exchange, monitoring, enforcement, and conflict resolution. To test our expectation we analyze a set of diplomatic disagreements over cross-border rivers coded by the Issue Correlates of War project. We combine this database with treaty content data from the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database. Empirical analyses suggest that information exchange and enforcement provisions in river treaties are most effective for preventing militarization of river claims and increase the chances that negotiations over river claims successfully resolve the issues at stake. Enforcement provisions also promote third-party dispute settlement attempts and increase the likelihood of compliance with agreements reached. States that share membership in river basin organizations are more likely to experience militarized disputes and less likely to be amenable to third-party dispute settlement. However, the latter states are more likely to reach agreements in peaceful negotiations over their river claims. These findings demonstrate that institutional design influences riparian states’ ability to address water disputes.

Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn by Jean R. Soderlund (review)

Reviewed by: Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn by Jean R. Soderlund Sandra L. Dahlberg LENAPE COUNTRY: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn. By Jean R. Soderlund. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. A commonly held idea is that Quaker settlers led by William Penn established Delaware Valley society’s emphases on freedom, tolerance, and peaceful conflict. In Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn, however, Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that these Delaware Valley hallmarks originated with the Lenape Indians and were the bases of Lenape economic and political dominance through successive waves of European colonization in the region. Soderlund states that the Lenapes were “amicable in large part from their own self-interest,” but also points out that the Lenapes’ value system was predicated on “a long-term commitment to personal freedom, religious liberty, political sovereignty, and peaceful resolution of conflict” that allowed Lenape and European communities to flourish (92, 196). Soderlund focuses on the period between 1615 and 1681, from the initial Dutch and Swedish colonies to Penn’s Quaker settlement. Soderlund convincingly argues that, until the 1730s, Europeans adapted to conditions that the Lenapes established for trade and land use and respected Lenape autonomy. In the seventeenth century, to ensure political stability in the region, the Lenapes “protected the Swedes and Dutch from each other because the competition among Europeans allowed the Natives to set prices and define the terms of trade” (75). Soderlund shows that the Lenapes determined where Europeans erected forts for trade and how much agricultural land they cultivated. Rather than permanently ceding their lands to Europeans, the Lenapes granted Europeans land-use privileges for which the Lenape received annual gifts from the settlers. Only once did settlers, the Dutch at Swanendael in 1631, circumvent the Lenapes’ terms. The Lenapes destroyed Swanendael, forcefully demonstrating that they preferred peaceful relations but would resort to violence to protect their sovereignty and maintain political dominance in the region. Soderlund’s thorough examination of colonial documents yields evidence that the Lenapes, not the Europeans, dictated conflict resolution processes. An example Soder-lund provides is the Lenape mourning war tradition, whereby “family members of a murder victim either could accept compensation in wampum or other goods to ‘cover’ the death or could kill the perpetrator” (38). Significantly, Soderlund demonstrates that through mourning war the Lenapes redressed smallpox deaths that they attributed to Europeans, from whom the Lenapes expected and received appropriate compensation. Soderlund shows that the Lenapes sustained mutually beneficial, peaceful alliances with the Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and English while maintaining their autonomy and sovereignty in the region until the Quakers’ arrival in the 1680s. The Lenapes outnumbered the Europeans until roughly 8,000 Quakers settled in the Delaware Valley between 1680 and 1685. Even though, as Soderlund states, “the Friends’ belief in religious liberty and commitment to friendly relations with Native Americans complemented [Lenape] cultural practices already in place,” Quakers also [End Page 122] instituted a hierarchical political structure that privileged provincial investors who expected profits (149). The English and Quakers challenged the land usage of the Lenapes’ “Swedish” (Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and German) allies and levied taxes to generate proprietary income, actions that led Swedes to abandon the region. Soderlund painstakingly details the most devastating blow to Lenape sovereignty, the 1737 Walking Purchase. Soderlund argues that because Penn did not complete the treaty by paying the Lenapes in full or delineating the boundaries of his “purchase,” the resultant confusion enabled Penn’s heirs and Penn’s secretary of the province, James Logan, to defraud the Lenapes by seizing the vast majority of remaining Lenape land. Throughout her book, Soderlund asserts that the Lenapes identified themselves as “’a free people, subject to no one,’ and as a group had no interest in destroying the liberty of others” (198). Even in the midst of decline, Lenape commitment to liberty compelled the Pennsylvania assembly to ban the importation of Carolina Indian slaves to the Delaware Valley. Soderlund’s Lenape Country provides an important corrective to Eurocentric myths about the evolution of Delaware Valley society. Lenape Country is meticulously researched and cautiously analyzed, qualities that strengthen Soderlund’s assertions for the primacy of Lenape influence in the formation...

The Political Legacies of Combat: Attitudes Toward War and Peace Among Israeli Ex-Combatants

AbstractRecent research has highlighted combat's positive effects for political behavior, but it is unclear whether they extend to attitudes toward the conflict itself. We exploit the assignment of health rankings determining combat eligibility in the Israel Defense Forces to examine the effect of combat exposure on support for peaceful conflict resolution. Given the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to global affairs, and its apparent intractability, the political consequences of combat become all the more pressing. We find that exposure to combat hardens attitudes toward the rival and reduces support for negotiation and compromise. Importantly, these attitudes translate into voting behavior: combatants are likely to vote for more hawkish parties. These findings call for caution in emphasizing the benign effects of combat and underscore the importance of reintegrating combatants during the transition from conflict to peace.

Emergency Rule : A Panacea for Peace and Conflict Resolution in Nigeria

A state of emergency is traditionally invoked in order to justify a departure from or stretching of the rule of law, here the existence of an emergency is a prerequisite to invoking the rule of law at all. This paper examines the potency of a ‘state of emergency’ in peace and conflict resolution in Nigeria. Thus, the main concern of the paper was to interrogate how far a state of exception can be explored in times of emergency situations to engender peace in the polity. From a theoretical viewpoint, the paper argues that a state of emergency is located within the fiduciary function of a state. Fundamentally, the nature and the function of the state of emergency or ‘state of exception’ is to guarantee peace, security and equal freedom for everybody. The paper concludes by stating clearly that the conflict scenario portends negatively for the sustenance of national security in Nigeria. The paper recommends that emergency rule should be managed by the authorities in manners that will facilitate the realization of the goals of peace building and conflict resolution. Also, it suggests a strategic paradigm shift from anti-terrorism to counter-terrorism as a strategy for containing the crisis.

Conflict, Militarization, and Their After-Effects: Key Challenges for TESOL

Skyrocketing military spending, ongoing military conflicts, and human displacement worldwide have significant consequences for the teaching and learning of English. TESOL increasingly requires a robust research base that can provide informed, critical guidance in preparing English language teachers for work in and near conflict zones, for teaching refugees and asylum seekers, and, more broadly, for teaching English in highly militarized times. This investigation, which takes the form of a transdisciplinary, translocal literature review, consolidates and extends TESOL’s peace–conflict studies through a close examination of two areas that are connected but rarely considered in tandem: TESOL’s multiple involvements and entanglements in armed and militarized conflicts and their aftermath, and the challenges of teaching English in a conflict zone or for students who have escaped or been exiled from one. Implications for pedagogy and further research are suggested. The argument is, in short, that the dialectical relationship between TESOL and conflict is in urgent need of collegial scrutiny, that teachers need to be equipped to facilitate critical and creative engagement with English not apart from broader sociopolitical realities but in relation to these, and that the implications of conflict for language learning are relevant across the wider TESOL community, given world developments. doi: 10.1002/tesq.187

How conflict begets conflict: Activation of the ethos of conflict in times of distress in a society involved in an intractable conflict

The research addressed the possible association between distress and the Ethos of Conflict (EOC), a system of shared beliefs that characterizes societies involved in intractable conflicts. It is argued that the EOC may assist processes of coping with distress and therefore will be activated in times of distress. Three studies were conducted with samples of Israeli Jews, who are involved in an intractable conflict with the Palestinians. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrated that conditions of high (vs. low) distress, either related or unrelated to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, increased EOC activation but not self-reported EOC adherence. Study 2 demonstrated that the activation of the EOC under distress facilitated processing of EOC-consistent information and hindered processing of EOC-contradicting information. The findings are consistent with the notion that the EOC may play a role in coping with distress, but this association may pose a barrier to peaceful conflict resolution.

China and the law of the sea: implications for Arctic governance

Guided by insights from international relations theory, this article investigates China’s adherence to the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), asking how Beijing’s attitude towards UNCLOS affects China’s role in Arctic governance and beyond. Examining contested Law of the Sea matters – the dispute over the “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea, the right of innocent passage of warships and the role of international arbitration – it argues that China’s compliance with UNCLOS does matter for understanding how China is perceived as a member of the international community. Further, China’s growing interests and enhanced engagement in the Arctic depend on a strong international legal framework; Arctic governance encapsulates the norms of multilateralism and rule of law. The article concludes by asking whether Chinese experiences from observing and participating in the multilateral governance of the Arctic can serve as an example of successful multilateral cooperation and peaceful conflict solution, of relevance to China also in its nearby maritime regions.

Negotiated Exits from Organized Crime? Building Peace in Conflict and Crime‐affected Contexts

This article contributes to a growing discussion in peace mediation and peacebuilding circles about the issue of dialogue and negotiation with organized crime groups. The article seeks to demystify this issue by exploring the range of practice from confrontation to accommodation and transformation. The article argues that there is nothing unusual about engaging in dialogue and negotiation with organized crime groups and that those strategies have been used for decades in crime and violence reduction efforts in urban and civil war settings. In their quest to resolve conflict in violent and fragile contexts, mediators and negotiators can adapt existing peacebuilding practice to help structure dialogue processes with organized crime groups.

North Korean Futures

The purpose of this paper is to examine the diplomatic paradox of the DPRK following the global financial crisis and the co called “Arab Spring,” each of which had a unique impact on the behavior and policy decisions of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Paradoxically, while their aggressive position has mostly come from a desire to solve perceived security challenges, it has caused deeper economic woes and a further detraction from the lower Songbun categories: the marginalized and “untouchable” caste in North Korea. The results are growing destabilization, more widespread human suffering resembling the famine of the 1990s and an increased dependence on China. Peaceful conflict management with North Korea has been an ongoing discussion largely focused upon the development of nuclear weapons, the expansion of ballistic missile technology and recurring acts of hostility toward neighbors. However, the UN also describes the situation to include “persisting deterioration in human rights situation” and “systemic, widespread and grave violation of civil, political, economic and social and cultural rights.” Central planning failures have further led to widespread environmental problems rendering large amounts of land unproductive (in an already mountainous country) as well as many homeless and in poverty. The current state of affairs is simply unsustainable and creating greater regional conflict. This paper will attempt to consider how these macroscopic economic and political factors run alongside sociocultural ones, as was seen in the “Arab Spring”, which carry unintended consequences in how the DPRK tried to control the “carrots and sticks” as a security measure in the wake of the recent global financial crisis and continued growth of China. While the goal has been to foster more external security (historically very effective and fits inside a preexisting political paradigm) more internal instability exists than arguably ever before. An increased understanding of the values at work can lead toward different strategies for diplomacy and the normalization of relations in the current Northeast Asian conflict.

Book Review: <i>Civil Wars, Child Soldiers and Post Conflict Peace Building in West Africa</i>

Book Review: <i>Civil Wars, Child Soldiers and Post Conflict Peace Building in West Africa</i>

The Conflict in the Indian Northeast

This paper looks at the conflict in the Indian northeast and revolves primarily around the different levels of conflict. The Indian northeast is most certainly one of the most under- researched conflict zones in academia. This paper uses Mary Kaldor’s ‘New War’ thesis as a theoretical framework to understand the situation, and pays special attention to its very complex and multifaceted nature. The paper argues that the levels of violence differ from one state to another in a region which has always had complicated relations with the rest of India since 1947. Poverty, corruption, administrative failure, police brutality, identity politics, human rights abuses and the role played by external actors such as China and Burma in the region are some of the key features associated with this conflict. There is a special focus on Nagaland since the Naga conflict is the oldest of all the conflicts in the region. The rest of the paper looks at some of the other states of the Indian northeast which include Assam, Manipur and Tripura and take them up collectively for discussion. Finally, after making an assessment of the entire region, the paper tries to suggest methods of peaceful building and conflict management as the way forward.

Transatlantic conflict management inside-out: the impact of domestic norms on regional security practices

This article explores the impact of domestic norms on regional security practices in a pluralistic security community in the transatlantic area. A security community is considered to be ‘a group which has become integrated, where integration is defined as the attainment of a sense of community, accompanied by formal or informal institutions or practices, sufficiently strong and widespread to assure peaceful change among members of a group with “reasonable” certainty over a “long” period of time’ (Karl W Deutsch, Sidney A Burrell, Robert A Kann, Maurice Lee Jr, Martin Lichterman, Raymond E Lindgren, Francis L Loewenheim and Richard W Van Wagenen (1957) Political community and the North Atlantic area: international organization in the light of historical experience (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press)). Recent studies have aligned the concept of security community with the practice turn in International Relations theory. Although practice theory is able to explain peaceful conflict resolution within a security community, this article shows that its explanatory power is significantly weaker when it comes to military interventions outside the security community. The article theoretically and empirically investigates this argument by using the empirical case of extraregional conflict management in Afghanistan. The importance of domestic norms in constructing and perceiving regional security practices in out-of-area operations emphasizes the ‘local’ over the ‘regional’ as a crucial driver behind the emergence of a regional actor's understanding of security and thus for the formation and consolidation of regional peace.

Beginnings of my journey

My career as a peace and constructive conflict scholar and a sometimes peace activist derives from personal inclinations, world conditions and intellectual understandings as a boy and young man.1 I...

Extremism from the perspective of a system approach.

Modern Russian society is witnessing a considerable level of extremism. By denying basic vested rights and freedoms of citizens or by opposing the established order of socio-regularized and legitimatized relations, is a threatening phenomenon to society.Extremism is an equally urgent problem for many countries irrespective of their political and socioeconomic advancements. Worldwide experience shows that as a way and a means of handling socioeconomic, political, religious, ecological, and other issues can emerge in almost any country including industrially developed and politically stable ones. As Dontsov and Perelygina (2011) put it, A great threat to social stability is posed by periods of acute social crises and shocks, upheavals, and revolutions, which have brought about drastic changes in social structure, together with the resulting very profound crises of historical consciousness and also of 'time out of joint,' the crisis of the historical continuity of culture (p. 43).It has become a rule to explain the decrease in the number of conflicts involving state participation in the late 1990s and the early 2000s by the increase of international efforts at peaceful conflict settlement (Human Security Centre, 2006a, 2006b). However, despite the decrease in several indicators of military activity, threats to security have not disappeared, but, on the contrary, they have increased according to various independent parameters. Total human losses caused by all kinds of political violence have been virtually unchanged since the beginning of the 2000s. According to Stepanova's data, Those forms of armed violence that do not only decrease in number but are on the uptick -- terrorism, interconfession and other forms of intercommunity violence -- and are less lethal than, for instance, conventional wars, are first and foremost directed towards civilians (Stepanova, 2008). general level of the infringement of human rights worldwide is not decreasing either. The public mind has not yet adjusted to the perception of modern risks. current dynamic of social sentiments reflects a growing level of expectations of uncertainty (Zinchenko & Zotova, 2013, p. 110).The concept of (from the Latin extremis, ultimate, and the French extremisme) is used to define a stance (regarding ideology, intentions, actions) corresponding to extreme opinions. According to documentation from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is a form of political activity that, directly or indirectly, denies the principle of parliamentary democracy. In Russia the legal definition of acts treated as extremist ones is provided in article 1 of Federal Law 114-??: On counteracting extremist activities. In compliance with amendments of April 29, 2008, the following activities are among those referred to as extremist: forcible changes in the constitutional structure and corruption of the integrity of the Russian Federation; public justification of terrorism and terrorist activities; incitement of social, racial, national, or religious enmity; propaganda about exceptionalism, the superiority or inferiority of an individual owing to his/her social, racial, religious, or linguistic background or attitude toward religion; violation of the rights, freedoms, and legitimate interests of an individual as a citizen depending on his/her social, racial, religious, or linguistic background or attitude to religion (Zinchenko, 2011).The psychology of itself is a subject of special interest. Psychology researches in its multiaspectual form of origin and its multivariant forms of passing into society as a sociopsychological phenomenon expressed by the actions of individuals and groups.In a position paper entitled Addressing Extremism, Coleman and Bartoli (2003) emphasize that extremism is, in essence, a complex phenomenon in spite of the fact that its complexity is difficult to detect and to understand. …