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Peace operations are increasingly on the front line in the international community’s fight against organized crime; this book explores how, in some cases, peace operations and organized crime are clear enemies, while in others, they may become tacit allies. The threat posed by organized crime to international and human security has become a matter of considerable strategic concern for national and international decision-makers, so it is somewhat surprising how little thought has been devoted to addressing the complex relationship between organized crime and peace operations. This volume addresses this gap, questioning the emerging orthodoxy that portrays organized crime as an external thre...
This book critically examines the security-development nexus through an analysis of organised crime responses in post-conflict states. As the trend has evolved, the security-development nexus has received significant attention from policymakers as a new means to address security threats. Integrating the traditionally separate areas of security and development, the nexus has been promoted as a new strategy to achieve a comprehensive, people-centred approach. Despite the enthusiasm behind the security-development nexus, it has received significant criticism. This book investigates four tensions that influence the integration of security and development to understand why it has failed to live u...
Liberal peacebuilding too often builds neither peace nor Liberalism. In a growing number of cases, people aren’t rejecting and relegating democracy because it’s bad; they’re challenging it because it isn’t relevant to their priorities and needs. The peacebuilding ‘moment’ – when consent for intervention is present and the opportunity to build a sustainable social contract between peacebuilders and people is most fruitful – is being squandered. This relationship, between governed and governance, relies on mutual needs realization, but there is no formal or informal requirement and mechanism for ascertaining what the ‘subjects’ of peacebuilding might prioritize. Instead, pe...
This edited volume examines the implications for international development actors of new kinds of terrorism taking place in civil conflicts. The threat from terrorism and violent extremism has never been greater – at least in the global South where the vast majority of violent extremist attacks take place. Some of the most violent extremist groups are also parties to civil conflicts in regions such as the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. But are these groups – especially the violent Islamists which constitute the greatest current threat – qualitatively different from other conflict actors? If they are, what are the implications for development practitioners working in war zones and fragile or poverty-afflicted countries? This study aims to answer these questions through a combination of theoretical enquiry and the investigation of three case studies – Kenya, Nigeria, and Iraq/Syria. It aims to illuminate the differences between violent Islamists and other types of conflict actor, to identify the challenges these groups pose to development practice, and to propose a way forward for meeting these challenges.
Asks how, why and to what ends humans appear in international relations theories and how this makes us interpret world politics.
Tackles difficult and concrete issues such as how the economics of war and terrorism inform humanitarians' negotiations with combatants.
A collection of essays on the politics of boundaries, this book addresses a broad range of cases, some geographical, some legal, and some involving less tangible practices of inclusion and exclusion. The book begins by exploring the boundary between modern Western forms of international relations and their constitutive outsides. Beyond this, the author engages with relations between subjectivity and security, security and nature, social movements and a world politics, as well as the politics of spatiotemporal dislocation. Two chapters address the work of Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber as exemplary accounts of the relationship between boundaries and the constitution of modern forms of politics. ...
This book analyses the use of communication in resolving conflicts, with a focus on de-escalation and processes of peacebuilding and peace formation. From the employment of hate radio in the Rwanda genocide, to the current conflict between Russia and the Ukraine following events in the Crimea, communication and the media are widely recognized as powerful tools in conflicts and war. Although there has been significant academic attention on the relationship between the media, conflict and war, academic efforts to understand this relationship have tended to focus primarily on the links between communication and conflict, rather than on communication and peace. In order to make sense of peace it...
The transition from war to peace is fraught with tension and the risk of a return to bloodshed. With so much at stake, it is crucial that the international community and local stakeholders make sense of the complex mosaic of challenges, to support a lasting, inclusive and prosperous peace. Recent missions, such as in Afghanistan, Somalia, or Sudan, have highlighted the fact that there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to steering countries away from violence and towards stability. This Adelphi offers a series of economic perspectives on conflict resolution, to show how the challenges of peacebuilding can be more effectively tackled. From the need to marry diplomatic peacemaking with devel...
This book explores the meaning of local ownership in peacebuilding and examines the ways in which it has been, and could be, operationalized in post-conflict environments. In the context of post-conflict peacebuilding, the idea of local ownership is based upon the premise that no peace process is sustainable in the absence of a meaningful degree of local involvement. Despite growing recognition of the importance of local ownership, however, relatively little attention has been paid to specifying what precisely the concept means or how it might be implemented. This volume contributes to the ongoing debate on the future of liberal peacebuilding through a critical investigation of the notion of local ownership, and challenges conventional assumptions about who the relevant locals are and what they are expected to own. Drawing on case studies from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, the text argues that local ownership can only be fostered through a long-term consensus-building process, which involves all levels of the conflict-affected society. This book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, development studies, security studies and IR.