Peace Initiatives Research Articles

Keeping the Peace in Somalia: Are “African Solutions to African Problems” Enough?

After suffering significant casualties in peacekeeping operations in Africa, several powerful countries, including the U.S. and some of its western allies, exhibited reluctance to deploy their troops in Africa in significant numbers or for long periods of time. Since then many western powerful states exhibited fatigue and reduced their involvement in peace initiatives on the continent where Somalia is could be taken as one of those best cases. “Africa fatigue” by the powerful Western countries motivated and necessitated for the emergence of the “African solution to African problems” maxim. It is in this context that the AU authorized a range of peace operations, among them, AU Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), to respond to the complex conflicts that have engulfed the continent. The objective of this study is to explore whether the approach of “African solutions to African problems” is enough to address the severe humanitarian situation of Somalia or not. The study looks at the case of Somalia for two reasons. First, Somalia has faced a prolonged civil war fuelled by intense internal conflict and exacerbated by external influences. Secondly, the AU has been playing a leading role in the resolutions of the conflicts using a multidimensional approach that involved diplomatic, mediatory and military mechanisms over a longer period of time. More importantly, the case of Somalia is chosen mainly because the case is among the glaring example of AU‟s comprehensive peace operation. Other African countries such as Burundi, Comoro Islands, Mali, Central African Republic and the like have also hosted peace support operations however; these missions were conducted for short period. Hence, examining the AU‟s relatively short-term responses presents challenges as these short-term missions may not test the capacity of African Union compared to the long-term peace operations (Somalia).

DMZ세계평화공원 추진 및 운영에 대한 법적지원방안

May 2013, Park Geun-hye of the president of the U.S. senate in a speech to dmz the World Peace Initiative after a public offering, the DMZ is a new park the two Koreas.(- building trust process) the confidence-building process of public opinion as to be New Year’s Day of the spotlight.The proposed DMZ World Peace Park at the time is fundamentally different from the previous plan in that it not only covers the southern part of the Demilitarized Zone but also the northern part of the DMZ, but also opens up the main body of the park’s creation and operation to the international community, including the two Koreas, the United Nations, the United States and China.<BR> The purpose of this study is to illuminate the Demilitarized Zone from a legal and institutional point of view and explore domestic legal support measures for the future creation and operation of the World Peace Park. Prior to the full-fledged analysis of the system, a brief look at the concept of the Demilitarized Zone and the normality of the Armistice Agreement, which is the basis for its direct installation, in order to understand the legal reality of the Demilitarized Zone. The constitutional and unification legal significance of the World Peace Park project to be created in the Demilitarized Zone based on the problems of legal reality found herein and the legal basis of the current law are considered (II respectively.<BR> Next, in the analysis of the current system, the normative system currently applied in the Demilitarized Zone will be divided into international and domestic law aspects, and among these, regulations that serve as obstacles to the relationship with the World Peace Park project will be reviewed (III). This study mainly aims to check domestic legal elements, but to the extent deemed essential, such as the Armistice Agreement, the international legal problems will also be pointed out and solutions reviewed together.

Religious Humanitarianism and the Evolution of Sudan People’s Liberation Army (1990-2005)

During the Cold War, military and economic tensions between the US and the Soviet Union shaped the process of war in conflict regions in different parts of the world. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s reshaped the balance of power in global politics, as new actors appeared on the global scene and global foreign policy shifted to mediating and providing humanitarian assistance in conflict regions zones. Humanitarianism became the method of conflict resolution, which provided humanitarian organizations, especially the religious ones among them, with the opportunity to have more influence in the outcomes of sociopolitical events occurring in the world. These dynamics impacted conflicts in Africa, especially within Sudan. This is because that era coincided with Sudan’s Second Civil War (1983-2005) between the Sudan People Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Government of Sudan (GofS). During the Cold War, both the US and Russia intervened in the civil war in Sudan by providing military and economic assistance to different parties, but, again, in the post-Cold War era humanitarianism was used in relation to the civil war. Transnational religious organizations provided humanitarian assistance in the war-torn and drought-afflicted regions in Southern Sudan, and sought to help implement peace initiatives to end the war. The organizations included Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), a consortium of UN agencies and NGOs1 which was created in 1989. In addition, transnational religious groups based in the United States and Canada such as the Christian Solidarity International (CSI), the Canadian Crossroads, Catholic Relief Service, Mennonite Central Committee and the Lutheran Church got involved in humanitarian relief in Sudan. The global focus on religious humanitarianism extended to Southern Sudan as the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC) was founded in 1989-1990 to coordinate the humanitarian assistance. Because SPLA has led the civil war on behalf of Southern Sudan and had suzerainty over territories there, the humanitarian organizations had to build relationships with the SPLA to deliver relief through Southern Sudan and negotiate peace initiatives. This article analyzes how the transnational activities of the religious humanitarian groups shaped the evolution of SPLA from 1990 to 2005, with a particular focus on the US and Canadian organizations. We will see that the organizations influenced SPLA in a manner that impacted the civil war both in positive and negative ways. The organizations were ambivalent as, on one hand, they aggravated the conflict and, on the other hand influenced the development of both Church and non-Church related peace initiatives. Their humanitarian work was intricate as the civil war itself became more complex due to political issues that involved slavery, and oil extraction in Southern Sudan by US and Canadian multinational oil companies. All the parties involved took action to help end the civil war, but they all sought to serve their own interests, which jeopardized the possibility of a lasting peace. Thus, the interpretation of that history provides ways to help solve the current armed conflict in South Sudan.

Political leadership for peace processes: Juan Manuel Santos – Between hawk and dove

Many studies have explored Colombia’s peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – guerrilla group (2012–2016). Conflict negotiation literature indicates that the impact of leadership is particularly relevant to peace processes as leaders have to find a balance between war and peace. Still, little is known about the political leaders in charge. This study deals with the development of a political leader’s leadership in peace initiatives. It uses an in-depth case study of Colombia’s former President Juan Manuel Santos combining leadership and conflict negotiation literature to trace back the origins of his leadership. Santos, a controversial figure, represented a policy of reconciliation to negotiate with the opponents while also appearing tough in order to maintain his political base. Between hawk and dove, he initiated and signed the peace negotiation and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. I adopt a personal biography approach using biographical data to explore the origins of Santos’ beliefs and values, his competence and skills and the way others perceived him. Linking this leadership-centred argument with findings from the conflict negotiation suggests that a pragmatic and reconciliation-oriented leadership might be relevant to find solutions to protracted conflicts like the one in Colombia. Most importantly, it contributes to a significant claim: Leaders have at least some level of choice and their biographical factors are relevant for political outcomes.

Reducing deforestation through value chain interventions in countries emerging from conflict: The case of the Colombian cocoa sector

Sustainability commitments by private sector actors are emerging as interventions to help reduce global deforestation. Much attention is placed on the forest conservation impact of these interventions in areas where commodity production constitutes a main driver of deforestation. It is, however, less clearly understood what role they could play in areas where the production of commodities is not evidently leading to the loss of forest and how they could contribute to other objectives including sustainable rural development and peacebuilding. In this paper, we examine the potential of the cocoa sector in Colombia in achieving deforestation reduction and peacebuilding simultaneously, as aimed by the country's Cocoa, Forests and Peace Initiative. Results from correlations and spatially explicit analyses show that regardless of its widespread production across Colombia, in the past fifteen years cocoa has not been an important driver of deforestation. This suggests that efforts to end deforestation in the Colombian cocoa sector emerged following global trends, and not because of an evident link between cocoa production and deforestation. Furthermore, results from spatial clustering analyses highlight areas where different types of value chain interventions may be appropriate to parallel forest conservation and peacebuilding, while interviews with key actors in the cocoa sector provide clues as to how these interventions should be developed and implemented. Specifically, our results show that narratives around approaches to achieve zero deforestation from agricultural commodities should (1) be adjusted to local contexts, (2) incorporate location-specific development needs, (3) complement existing rural development efforts, (4) enhance collaboration among actors that operate both within and beyond the value chain, and (5) apply high-resolution data to assess deforestation-commodity relations and verify zero-deforestation commitments. These considerations are particularly relevant in contexts where commodity production is not evidently leading to deforestation, as in the case of cocoa production in Colombia.

The political economy of peace processes and the Women, Peace and Security agenda

ABSTRACT This article examines why the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has been so challenging to implement and argues that the political economy of war and peace, driven by a complex network of power, is a deterrent to sustainable and gender-just peace. However, peace initiatives are not a zero-sum game. They are dialectical, offering possibilities for both regressive and transformative change. Although inclusion of women and gender concerns in current peace processes lags behind expectations, the WPS agenda has been instrumental in changing the negotiation landscape and empowering women beyond the peace table. It has also exposed the need for a paradigm shift in the understanding of peace and security that effectively responds to power asymmetries and the neo-liberal environment that shapes policy and practice. Given their marginalised positioning vis-à-vis hegemonic power structures, women stand to contribute towards this end.

In search of a solution: Nigerian newspaper coverage of peace initiatives in a time of national crisis

The study analyzed Nigerian newspaper coverage of various stakeholders’ peace initiatives to resolve the Niger Delta crisis of 2006 to 2009. Four purposively selected dailies: the THISDAY, The Guardian, the Vanguard and The Sun published between January 1, 2006 and October 4, 2009 were content analyzed. The population was 5,532 issues from where a sample of 553 was systematically selected. Coding was by two independent coders and the inter-coder reliability stood at 0.77 using Scott’s pi. index. The pattern of coverage indicated that the peace initiatives of local leaders (39.47 %) were the most covered, followed by the peace initiatives of the Federal Government of Nigeria/ Oil firms (23.44 %). This was followed by peace efforts of other stakeholders (27%) and NGOs (10.09 %). The result could imply that local leaders in the Niger Delta were more concerned about the crisis and wanted it quickly resolved, hence initiated more peace efforts than the Federal Government / Oil Firms widely believed to have aggravated the crisis. On individual newspaper coverage, the Vanguard paid the most attention to peace efforts by various stakeholders (31.16 %), followed by the THISDAY (27.60 %). Both papers provided more than half of the coverage of peace initiatives. More studies are needed to establish whether the newspapers overlooked some peace efforts of the Federal Government / Oil firms.

International Peace Efforts in the Syrian Civil War: The ‘Inevitable’ Failure?

The purpose of this article is to assess international negotiation efforts towards ending the civil war in Syria. Although many peace events have been organised since the beginning of the civil war, the existing literature has paid little attention on the impact of international peace efforts in ending the Syrian war. The article aims to close this gap by assessing major peace efforts between 2011 and 2019: The Arab League Peace Plan, the United Nations peace initiatives, and the Geneva, Vienna and Astana peace talks. It analyses these efforts through official reports and documents published by the UN, US, Republic of Turkey, UN Security Council, and members of peace initiatives. These documents are complemented by newspaper articles showing the official views of the regional and global actors as well as the key agents of the conflict. Therefore, the article reveals the reasons for the failure of these conflict resolution efforts. It utilises official negotiation and ripeness approaches to investigate the insights and contents of peace efforts. The article argues that the regional and global powers have acted as facilitators instead of mediators in the peace talks. It finds that even though these peace events are viewed as official negotiations, they are only pre-negotiation efforts.

United Nations peace initiatives 1946-2015: introducing a new dataset

ABSTRACT The United Nations (UN) has developed a complex and interconnected system of committees, representatives, and missions in support of its peace and security mandate. This article introduces the United Nations Peace Initiatives (UNPI) data set, which provides information on 469 UN initiatives aimed at conflict prevention and crisis management, mediation, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. The data encompass all initiatives mandated by the UN Security Council, the General Assembly, as well as Secretary General between 1946 and 2015. This includes diplomatic, technocratic, political-development, and peacekeeping missions. UNPI data provide an empirical basis to assess the relative contributions of various UN subsidiary bodies to prevent, manage, and suppress the outbreak and recurrence of conflict. This article discusses the underlying rationale of the data collection, the coding rules, and procedures, and shows how UNPI can be combined with conflict data. Initial analyses show the increased use of different types of UN peace initiatives over time. The UN regularly deploys multiple peace initiatives to a dispute, often with significant periods of overlap. Ongoing hostilities and economic development are found to be key determinants of mission choice. In line with the theme of the Special Issue, the UNPI data set underscores the importance of, and provides a tool through which to examine the, interdependencies between various conflict management efforts.

The Road Not Taken: The Amirav-Husayni Peace Initiative of 1987

In the summer of 1987, Israeli citizens Moshe Amirav and David Ish Shalom initiated a secret unofficial negotiation channel with Palestinian leaders Faysal al-Husayni and Sari Nusseibeh, with the approval of the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership and the acknowledgment of senior members of Israel's ruling Likud party. But the attempt to turn the Amirav-Husayni initiative into official negotiations failed. This article analyzes the negotiations, examines the actors involved and the agreement, and discusses the historical importance of the initiative and the reasons for its failure.

New wine in old wine skin : an assessment of African Union’s peace and security initiatives

New wine in old wine skin : an assessment of African Union’s peace and security initiatives

Asia and the Saudi-Iranian “Cold War”: The Desirability of Non-Alignment, the Prospects for Détente, and the Chances of an Asian Peace Initiative

The Saudi-Iranian enmity is a central element in the Middle East’s post-2011 violence. These two countries are at ‘Cold War,’ backing proxy allies, which fuels many of the region’s conflicts. Hence, any attempt at regional pacification will require mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran by powerful neutral stakeholders. To that end, this paper suggests an initiative by the Persian Gulf’s most important economic partners, China and India, an idea benefiting from their leverage-enhancing hydrocarbon market importance as well as their ‘non-aligned status’ in the conflict. Using the historical analogy of the 20th century Cold War between East and West as a loose framework, the paper identifies possible diplomatic and institutional mechanisms to achieve a Gulf détente and peace. It argues that these may be found in the historic Helsinki Accords and that a similar approach to the Saudi-Iranian Cold War should be attempted to prevent further regional and global conflict.

A Research on the Three-layered Federation of Hannah Arendt : A Peace Initiative for the Resolution of the Conflict between Israel and Palestine

A Research on the Three-layered Federation of Hannah Arendt : A Peace Initiative for the Resolution of the Conflict between Israel and Palestine

Obstacles and Possibilities for Peace between Israel and Palestine

There have been various obstacles to resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the United Nations resolved to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Some of these obstacles have been psychological, with both sides contesting the identity and narrative of the other. More concrete barriers have been the many settlements built by Israel in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967, totaling today over 500,000 Israeli settlers. The article addresses these and other obstacles, but it also notes the important changes that have occurred, making resolution of the conflict possible. These include the pragmatic 1988 PLO decision to create a state next to the state of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem; the exchange of letters of mutual recognition between Chairman Arafat and Prime Minister Rabin that preceded the 1993 Oslo Principles, and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002.

‘We do not want to assimilate!’: Rethinking the role of group boundaries in peace initiatives between Muslims and Jews in Israel and in the West Bank

ABSTRACTThis article considers the cultural meaning of religious and community boundaries when attempting to mediate the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Here we compare two sites, one religious, the other secular, of peace-building encounters between Palestinians and Jews in Israel and in the West Bank. Through extensive ethnographic work, the study draws attention to the divergent meanings of community boundaries in liberal and non-liberal cosmologies. Whereas secular liberals view religious boundaries as barriers to the autonomous individual’s free choice, itself considered necessary for co-existence, for these Jewish and Muslim religious groups, those same boundaries safeguard a peaceful and respectful shared space. Our ethnographic insights call for a broader discussion of the meaning and use of social and symbolic boundaries beyond the liberal vision for social and moral order. Such a discussion is theoretically timely and politically pressing in view of the challenge of living together with difference in the global reality of deep diversity.

Assessing the Astana Peace Process for Syria: Actors, Approaches, and Differences

Since 2011, numerous peace initiatives have been initiated out by several actors to end the Syrian civil war in a peaceful way. This article presents the “Astana Peace Process” brokered by Russia, Turkey, and Iran in early 2017 as a case study of a mediation and examines its predecessors to understand the reasons for the failures of those attempts and develops an assessment of the Astana peace process itself. To gain a better understanding of the Astana peace process, this article incorporates the efforts of main actors, their approaches, and the context of the war. In doing so, the article begins by describing the background of the civil war and then uses traditional concepts in mediation theory to elucidate the limitations of the unsuccessful attempts. Next, it investigates how the Astana peace process was different and the driving factors that encouraged the states to engage in this process and argues that Astana peace process’s overall effectiveness is likely to remain limited due to the conflicting interests of the mediators.

Developing context-specific peace education initiatives with local communities: lessons from Bolivia

ABSTRACT Peace education is often carried out without being appropriately adapted to the contexts in which it takes place and rarely involves those most affected by the work in the design and planning of their own initiatives. This article reports on an original participatory action research project designed to contextualise a peace education initiative with local communities in Bolivia. It draws on fieldwork, including interviews and focus groups with policymakers, educators, and students, to show how local actors, including students, were involved in influencing what peace education should look like for them, focussing on its purpose, pedagogy, and content. Lessons learned are also discussed. The case study is offered within a larger context of how the international community can work with the direct beneficiaries to co-develop peace and education-related initiatives that are responsive to the needs of the particular groups and contexts they are trying to affect.

ЛІНГВОАКСІОЛОГІЧНЕ МОДЕЛЮВАННЯ КОНФЛІКТУ МІЖ ПРИБІЧНИКАМИ ТА ОПОНЕНТАМИ МИРНИХ ІНІЦІАТИВ ПРЕЗИДЕНТА УКРАЇНИ ВОЛОДИМИРА ЗЕЛЕНСЬКОГО

The article is devoted to the discursive projections of the discussion about President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and his peace initiatives. The articles about these initiatives published in the internetnewspaper «Ukrainska Pravda» were analyzed. It was selected for investigating the preparing for the Paris Summit on 9th December 2020 and reactions to its results. This discourse attracts attention due to the huge number of negative evaluations given to the traditionally positive value PEACE and to the actions directed towards gaining of it. The research has been carried out in the cognitive discoursive paradigm and critical discourse analysis. Those are approaches which let us open the meanings input by a speaker in the text sometimes unconsciously. It should be noted that investigation of hybrid wars highlights the great role of hided meanings in it. The original method of axiological dynamic modeling has been used to open these meanings. With its help, process and results of axiological categorization can be presented as an axiological propositional structure. Thus, the denoted situation «Peace initiatives by President of Ukraine Zelensky at the Paris Summit 2019» has been modeled with the propositional axiological frame. This frame contains such structural components: the subject of evaluation – Ukrainians, whose articles or comments were published in the internet-newspaper «Ukrainska Pravda»; the predicate of evaluation – «I think that my opinion is reliable and socially acceptable enough to become public»; the object of evaluation – President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, his political power and party, his peace initiatives and the value Peace as such; the predicate of evaluation: (1) positive and negative valences for the same objects, that give the reasons to say about axiological conflict; (2) criteria of evaluation – ACKNOWLEDGMENT, DEMOCRACY, JUSTICE, PATRIOTISM, POWER (SOCIAL STATUS), RESULT, SECURITY. As far as criteria of evaluation correlate with the value concepts of a speaker, one can say that those are the value concepts which become the basis for categorization of this situation. As regards the reason of the conflict, its sources can be such: (1) participants of the conflict share similar values but put them on different places in their hierarchical value systems; (2) different opinions about denotative meanings of mentioned values, first of all about meanings of the concepts SECURITY and PEACE.

Американский план палестино-израильского урегулирования («сделка века» Д. Трампа)

The article is devoted to the new plan for resolving Israeli-Palestinian contradictions entitled “Peace for Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People”. This document was presented to the public by the President of the United States Donald Trump in January 2020 in the presence of the Israeli Prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu and his political rival and a leader of Kahol Lavan party Benny Gantz. This new American peace initiative provoked heated discussion on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article it is examined the views of the main “architects” of the “deal of the century” - Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, who have made the most impact on the formation of the policy of the current administration in the Israeli-Palestinian settlement. The political components of the peace plan are highlighted with a focus on key issues such as the creation of a Palestinian state and the implementation of the “two states for two peoples” principle, the determination of the status of Jerusalem and the resolution of the problem of Palestinian refugees. The author identifies the main reasons why this initiative was immediately rejected by Palestinian leadership. The special attention is paid to the reaction to the Trump’s Peace for Prosperity plan in the United States by representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as pro-Israel lobbying groups. The author comes to the conclusion that the peace initiative of Donald Trump did not bring closer the prospect of achieving peace in the Middle East and creating a viable Palestinian state, but merely put it off.

Sustainable Development Goals in Arab Region – United Arab Emirates’ Case Study

The article presents an analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals in the Arab region with particular emphasis on the example of the UAE. The initiatives of this country deserve an in-depth analysis due to their scale, innovative nature and huge ambitions to achieve the first position in the world in many areas of activity, including the achievement of the objectives of the UN 2030 program. The article analyzes projects and their implementation, including Vision 2021, the Green economy program, the National Innovation Strategy, the Energy 2050 Strategy, initiatives for tolerance and world peace, humanitarian aid, or activities related to the fight against climate change. In this context, the World Expo is shown, which will take place in Dubai from October 2020 to April 2021 and for which sustainable development is one of the main themes. This article, presenting all these visions and activities serving their implementation, also shows the context of the huge dynamics of the population development of the UAE, including Dubai, which just before the establishment of the state in 1971 had a population of 80,000 thousand to nearly 4 million today. The article shows the socio-political aspects of sustainable development and the impact of new technologies on sustainable development.