This book analyses the role power sharing, social movements, economic regeneration, urban space, memorialisation and symbols play in transforming divided societies into shared peaceful ones. It explains why some projects are counterproductive while others assist peace-building.

This book explores the nexus between education and politics in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Macedonia, drawing from an extensive body of original evidence and literature on power-sharing and post-conflict education in these post-conflict societies, as well as the repercussions that emerged from the end of civil war. This book demonstrates that education policy affects the resilience of political settlements by helping reproduce and reinforce the mutually exclusive religious, ethnic, and national communities that participated in conflict and now share political power. Using curricula for subjects—such as history, citizenship education, and languages—and structures like the existence of state-funded separate or common schools, Fontana shows that power-sharing constrains the scope for specific education reforms and offers some suggestions for effective ones to aid political stability and reconciliation after civil wars.

This book offers a comparative lens on the contested relationship between two leading conflict resolution norms: ethnopolitical power-sharing pacts and the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda. Championed by national governments and international organizations over the last two decades, power-sharing and feminist scholars and practitioners tend to view them as opposing norms. Critics charge that power-sharing scholars cast gender as an inconsequential political identity that does not motivate people like ethnonationalism. From a feminist perspective, such thinking serves the interests of ethnicized elites while excluding women and other marginalized communities from key sites of political power. This edited volume takes a different tack: while recognizing the gender gaps that still exist in power-sharing theory and practice, contributors also emphasize the constructive engagements that can be built between ethnopolitical power-sharing and gender inclusion. Three main themes are highlighted: The ‘gender silences’ of existing power-sharing arrangements The impact of gender activism and advocacy on the negotiation and implementation of power-sharing pacts in divided societies The opportunities for linkages between power-sharing and the women, peace and security agenda. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

This book offers an in-depth investigation of the emergence and spread of social mobilizations that transcend ethnicity in societies violently divided along ethno-national lines. Using Bosnia Herzegovina as a case study, the book explores episodes of mobilization which have superseded ethno-nationalist cleavages. Bosnia Herzegovina emerged from the 1992–95 war brutally impoverished and deeply ethnically divided, representing a critical and strategic case for the examination and understanding of the dynamics of mobilization in such divided societies. Despite difficult circumstances for civic-based collective action, social mobilizations in the country have grown in size, number and intensity in recent years. Marked by citizen demand for accountable governance, responsive urbanism, and access to basic human rights, these protests have been driven by economic, social and political problems which cut across religious and ethnic divides. Examining the variation in spatial and social scale of contention, the book investigates movements’ formation, their organizational structures and networking strategies and advances research on divided societies and social movements. This volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Southeastern Europe and those examining political dissent, social movements and mobilization in divided societies, as well as practitioners in civil society, grassroots groups and political activists.

The Good Friday Agreement is widely celebrated as a political success story, one that has brought peace to a region that was once synonymous around the globe with political violence. The truth, as ever, is rather more complicated than that. In many respects, the era of the peace process has seen Northern Irish society change almost beyond recognition. Those incidents of politically motivated violence that were once commonplace have become thankfully rare and a new generation has emerged whose identities and interests are rather more fluid and cosmopolitan than those of their predecessors. However, Northern Ireland continues to operate in the long shadow of its own turbulent past. Those who were victims of violence, as well as those who were its agents, have often been consigned to the margins of a society still struggling to cope with the traumas of the Troubles. Furthermore, the transition to ‘peace’ has revealed the existence of new, and not so new, forms of violence in Northern Irish society, directed towards women, ethnic minorities and the poor. Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday sets out to capture the complex, and often contradictory, realities that have emerged more than two decades on from the region’s vaunted peace deal. Across nine original essays, the authors offer a critical and comprehensive reading of a society that often appears to have left its violent past behind but at the same time remains subject to its gravitational pull.

Violently divided societies present major challenges to institutions seeking to establish peace in places characterised by ethnic conflict and high levels of social segregation. Yet such societies also contain groups that refuse to be confined within separate forms of ethnic community and instead develop alternative modes of action that generate shared identities, build trust and foster consensual, peaceful politics. Advancing a unique social movement approach to the study of violently divided societies, this book highlights how various social movements function within a context of violent ethnic politics and provide new ways of imagining citizenship that complements peacebuilding. By analysing the impact of social movements on divided societies, this book contributes to debates about the complexity of belonging and identity, and constructs a nuanced understanding of political mobilisation in regions defined by ethnic violence. In turn, the book provides important insights into the dynamics of social movement mobilisation. Based on the author's extensive research in Lebanon and Northern Ireland, and drawing on numerous examples from other divided societies, this book examines a range of social movements, including nationalists, victims, sexual minorities, labour movements, feminists, environmentalists, secularists, and peace movements. Bringing together social theory and case studies in order to consider how grassroots movements intersect with political institutions, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and policymakers working in sociology and politics.

The establishment of durable, democratic institutions constitutes one of the major challenges of our age. As countless contemporary examples have shown, it requires far more than simply the holding of free elections. The consolidation of a legitimate constitutional order is difficult to achieve in any society, but it is especially problematic in societies with deep social cleavages. This book provides an authoritative and systematic analysis of the politics of so-called 'deeply divided societies' in the post Cold War era. From Bosnia to South Africa, Northern Ireland to Iraq, it explains why such places are so prone to political violence, and demonstrates why - even in times of peace - the fear of violence continues to shape attitudes, entrenching divisions in societies that already lack consensus on their political institutions. Combining intellectual rigour and accessibility, it examines the challenge of establishing order and justice in such unstable environments, and critically assesses a range of political options available, from partition to power-sharing and various initiatives to promote integration. The Politics of Deeply Divided Societies is an ideal resource for students of comparative politics and related disciplines, as well as anyone with an interest in the dynamics of ethnic conflict and nationalism.