Post-conflict Politics Research Articles

Constructing Meaning from Disappearance: Local Memorialisation of the Missing in Nepal

Disappearance in conflict creates challenges of identity and meaning for the families of those whose fate remains unknown: women, for example, who do not know if they are wives or widows and desperately seek to construct positive meanings from their experience. This empirical study of the families of those disappeared during Nepal’s Maoist insurgency focuses on processes of local memorialisation and post-conflict politics of memory in rural areas and on how and why victims seek certain forms of recognition and memorialisation, including their psychosocial motivations. The means of memorialisation chosen by families of the missing served to confirm in a highly social way that the disappeared are missing not dead, and sought to integrate stigmatised families into communities from which they had been alienated by violations. Memorialisation can strengthen the resilience of families of the missing; as a social process, it addresses both the emotional and the social impacts of disappearance. Remembering the disappeared in ways that can aid the well-being of the families left behind demands local approaches that are contextualised in the cultural and social worlds of impacted communities: this challenges memorialisation, and transitional justice processes more broadly, that emerge exclusively from institutional processes directed by elites.

UN Resolution 1325 in Ireland: Limitations and Opportunities of the International Framework on Women, Peace and Security

The development of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 marked a significant step in recognising women's role in peace processes. While it has affected the drafting of peace agreements since its enactment, the question remains as to how to create appropriate structural spaces within a political system to give effect to 1325. This article reflects on the implementation of UNSCR 1325 on the island of Ireland. It considers the different interpretations of two sovereign governments on its applicability to post-conflict politics on the island of Ireland. It also evaluates the opportunities and challenges involved in applying this international framework to women, peace and security in a local context.

The Importance of Winning: Victorious Insurgent Groups and Post-Conflict Politics

Civil wars that end in rebel victory follow distinct war-to-peace transitions compared to the more often analyzed cases of negotiated settlement and internationally supported peacebuilding. In many cases, strong authoritarian parties dominate post-war politics insurgent triumph. Four cases in East Africa illustrate this pattern. The victorious Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), Uganda’s National Revolutionary Army (NRA), and Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), all remade themselves into authoritarian parties that dominated post-conflict politics. How is war termination by rebel victory linked to post-conflict authoritarian regimes? This paper proposes a mechanism that explains this pattern that emphasizes characteristics of the insurgent movement and the distinct characteristics of transition following victory.

Aid and Reconstruction of Heritage in the Context of Post-Conflict Societies

Reconstruction of destroyed heritage has been an important interest in the expenditure of international aid funds when confronting post-conflict situations. Prevention of destruction has also been of concern but with less success in the international conflict scene. However, when aid and reconstruction are the main objectives, the targets seldom agree with the realities of post-conflict politics and the rather slow process of societal restructuration. The often speedy need for “reconstruction” tends to be negative for the actual architectural heritage of a given society, and, as I underline here, often transgresses the delicate process of social healing. In this paper I will present problems and successes incurred in reconstruction strategies in post-conflict periods in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In sum, I will underline the strong correlation between interest and willingness to consider preservation of heritage and the solution to social, political and economic conflicts in post-war settings.

Wartime Violence and Post-Conflict Political Mobilization in Mozambique

AbstractMozambique’s post-conflict development has recently focused on the promise of biofuels production, and the Government of Mozambique has accordingly made hundreds of agricultural concessions to foreign and domestic corporations since 2006. In response, local groups have sought community land grants to protect livelihoods. We seek to understand whether the magnitude and recentness of violent events during Mozambique’s 16-year civil war determined the success of communities’ efforts to secure lands. We hypothesize that violence weakens the ability of communities to protect their traditional land uses from concessions by lobbying for community land grants. This hypothesis - dubbed the “weak institutions hypothesis” - is contrasted with the idea that violence galvanizes political participation. We test the hypothesis using GIS-generated data at the district level on recognized community landholdings and civil war events. Controlling for factors such as market access, road distance to grain warehouses, and spatial auto-correlation, we find that more intense violence is possibly (but not significantly) associated with more land grants, and that districts experiencing more recent violence are actually more likely to lobby successfully for land grants - lending support to the idea that violence boosts community use of riskpooling institutions.

Hybrid and ‘Everyday’ Political Ordering: Constructing and Contesting Legitimacy in Somaliland

A number of recent post-colonial liberal peace critiques have moved beyond the counter-positioning of ‘liberal/Western’ versus ‘communal/non-Western’ peace and political order. Instead, they draw attention to the interstices – the processes of contestation, repulsion and accommodation – between these approaches. Some argue that the most promising, if contentious, forms of political ordering and peace building take place exactly in a hybrid of state-based and liberal practices, and local customs and ‘everyday’ life in post-conflict settings.Through a case-study of Somaliland, this article examines the potentials and limits of such a hybrid approach to advancing peace and political order. The analysis in particular engages with the largely uncharted issue of how political legitimacy is constructed or undermined, in the context of post-conflict hybrid political orders. Somaliland’s reconstruction process was characterised by very low international intervention when compared to other so-called ‘fragile states’ and post-conflict settings. The article looks at how political institutions and structures of governance were constituted from within Somaliland through local agencies and formation of alliances, which cut across the dichotomies of ‘state/non-state’ and ‘liberal/traditional’ forms of governance and legitimacy. It illustrates the advantages, as well as some of the challenges, of this process of political ordering and hybridization, where the domestic sphere was allowed to be constitutive for the creation of legitimacy.Examining a small-scale international-local initiative of peace dialogues and community policing in Somaliland, the article also discusses how international support may engage with ‘everyday’ strategies of self-securing, and deliberately ‘facilitate’ hybridity in the context of conflict management and justice.The analysis offers an empirical anchoring of the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘everyday’, but also demonstrates how the case of Somaliland speaks more broadly to post-colonial liberal peace critiques and the call for new approaches to peace and political order.

Troubled state-building in the DR Congo: the challenge from the margins

ABSTRACTThis paper examines contentious state–society and centre–periphery relations in the DR Congo and their implications for state-building. Since the 2006 post-conflict elections, the state's authority has come under fire in the western province of Bas Congo, where a politico-religious group (Bundu Dia Kongo) has emerged as a serious challenger. Enjoying huge local legitimacy, the group has articulated political grievances that the newly elected central government has violently repressed. As locally perceived, elections are a legitimising tool in the hands of the government to impose its unfettered authority in the name of the state-building project. Furthermore, and backed by donors, the Kinshasa authorities also refuse to implement a wide-ranging decentralisation reform. This has fed disenchantment about post-conflict politics in Bas Congo, boding ill for democratic politics and the prospects of state-building in the DR Congo.

How to Maintain Peace and Security in a Post-conflict Hybrid Political Order – the Case of Bougainville

After a decade-long large-scale violent conflict, the Pacific island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea has gone through another decade of post-conflict peacebuilding and at present is confronted with the task of state formation. Peacebuilding has been a success story so far, and the prospects of state formation look promising. The maintenance of order, security and justice in post-conflict Bougainville is based on legal pluralism, with strong customary law and strong customary non-state policing. The violent conflict on Bougainville was a hybrid social-political exchange, with the causes and motivating factors stemming from both the sphere of statecentred politics (‘war of secession’) and the local societal realm in which non-state customary issues (land conflicts, pay back etc.) played a major role. This article explores the specific features of post-conflict peacebuilding on Bougainville that flow from this context, focussing on the local capacities, but also acknowledging the contribution of international peacekeeping, particularly through the United Nations and a regional Peace Monitoring Group. Based on the Bougainville experience, the article develops a critique of the conventional Western peacebuilding-asstatebuilding approach to fragile post-conflict situations, and it critiques the accompanying focus of external actors on capacity-building of state institutions for maintaining order and internal peace. It makes a case for an alternative approach which acknowledges the hybridity of political order and the co-existence and interplay of state and non-state providers of security and justice. Positive mutual accommodation of state and non-state customary institutions are presented as a more promising way to sustainable internal peace and order than the attempted imposition of the Western Weberian model of the state.

Emerging Patterns in Liberia's Post-Conflict Politics: Observations from the 2005 Elections

The 2005 elections were the first Liberian elections in over a century in which the political environment was controlled neither by the settler oligarchy nor, latterly, by the dictators Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor. Observers feared that the post-conflict environment was not conducive to holding elections and that a serious programme of reconciliation and constitutional reform should have preceded them. Nevertheless, elections were conducted with some degree of success, providing an opportunity to identify some emerging patterns in post-conflict Liberian politics. This article assesses some of the new or hitherto dormant institutions and processes that are likely to play a significant role in shaping Liberia's political order in the twenty-first century.