The Promise of Reconciliation? explores the relationship between violence, nonviolence, and reconciliation in societal conflicts with questions such as: In what ways does violence impact the reconciliation process that necessarily follows a cessation of deadly conflict? Would an understanding of how conflict has been engaged, with violence or nonviolence, be conducive to how it could be prevented from sliding further into violence?The contributors examine international influences on the peace/reconciliation process in Indonesia's Aceh conflict, as well as the role of Muslim religious scholars in promoting peace. They also examine the effect of violence in southern Thailand, where insurgent violence has provided "leverage" during the fighting, but negatively affects post-conflict objectives. The chapter on Sri Lanka shows that "successful" violence does not necessarily end conflict Sri Lankan society today is more polarized than it was before its civil war. The Vietnam chapter argues that the rise of nonviolent protest in Vietnam reflects a profound loss of state legitimacy, which cannot be resolved with force, while another chapter on Thailand examines "Red Sunday," a Thai political movement engaged in nonviolent protest in the face of violent government suppression. The book ends with a look at Indonesian cities, sites of ethnic conflicts, as potential abodes of peace if violence can be curtailed.

The socio-political activities of the Acehnese diaspora, located mainly in Malaysia, Scandinavia, the USA and Australia, have been of fundamental importance to conflict and politics within Aceh. The intensity of the relations between the diaspora and the homeland was mainly determined by the conflict that afflicted the region between 1976 and 2005, and the resulting hardship was experienced by Acehnese both at home and abroad. This book looks at more than thirty years of long-distance politics exercised by the Acehnese diaspora both during the conflict and beyond. It interprets the social, political and cultural aspects of the small-scale conflict in Aceh, as well as focusing on the external factors related to the Acehnese overseas and their impact on homeland politics. The book goes on to contribute to the argument that the Acehnese diaspora had a significant impact on those who remained in Aceh. By focusing on the triangular relationships between the homeland, the host countries and the Acehnese diaspora, the book draws attention to the exchange of people, ideas, and financial and material resources that has occurred. It is a useful contribution to Southeast Asian Politics and Diaspora Studies.

This book examines Japan’s foreign policy and its emerging identity as an important participant in conflict prevention and peacebuilding in Southeast and South Asia, demonstrating that Japan has increasingly sought a positive and active political role commensurate with its economic pre-eminence.

‘The Security-Development Nexus: Peace, Conflict and Development’ approaches the subject of the security-development nexus from a variety of different perspectives. Chapters within this study address the nexus specifically, as well as investigate its related issues, particularly those linked to studies of conflict and peace. These expositions are supported by a strong geographical focus, with case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe being included. Overall, the text’s collected essays provide a detailed and comprehensive view of conflict, security and development.

In 1998, Indonesia exploded with both euphoria and violence after the fall of its longtime authoritarian ruler, Soeharto, and his New Order regime. Hope centered on establishing the rule of law, securing civilian control over the military, and ending corruption. Indonesia under Soeharto was a fundamentally insecure state. Shadowy organizations, masterminds, provocateurs, puppet masters, and other mysterious figures recalled the regime's inaugural massive anticommunist violence in 1965 and threatened to recreate those traumas in the present. Threats metamorphosed into deadly violence in a seemingly endless spiral. In Aceh province, the cycle spun out of control, and an imagined enemy came to life as armed separatist rebels. Even as state violence and systematic human rights violations were publicly exposed after Soeharto's fall, a lack of judicial accountability has perpetuated pervasive mistrust that undermines civil society. Elizabeth F. Drexler analyzes how the Indonesian state has sustained itself amid anxieties and insecurities generated by historical and human rights accounts of earlier episodes of violence. In her examination of the Aceh conflict, Drexler demonstrates the falsity of the reigning assumption of international human rights organizations that the exposure of past violence promotes accountability and reconciliation rather than the repetition of abuses. She stresses that failed human rights interventions can be more dangerous than unexamined past conflicts, since the international stage amplifies grievances and provides access for combatants to resources from outside the region. Violent conflict itself, as well as historical narratives of past violence, become critical economic and political capital, deepening the problem. The book concludes with a consideration of the improved prospects for peace in Aceh following the devastating 2004 tsunami.

This book explores the role of nongovernmental mediators in promoting “inclusive peace” to negotiating parties in Myanmar’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) negotiations from 2011-2015. The influx of NGO mediators directly engaging with the negotiating parties and promoting the inclusivity norm coupled with the salience of discourse around “all-inclusiveness” at the end of the NCA process forms a puzzle around the agency that NGO mediators wield in influencing political outcomes, despite their lack of political and material leverage.The author argues that NGO mediators can effectively promote norms, using mediation processes as a site of norm diffusion. Bespoke international conflict resolution NGOs have become key mediation actors, within the last three decades through creating the niche world of “private diplomacy” and acting as "norm entrepreneurs" at the same time. As informal third parties, these NGO mediators directly engage with politically sensitive actors or convene unofficial peace talks. As NGOs, they are part of an epistemic community of mediation practice, professionalizing the field and producing knowledge on what peace mediation is and what it ought to be. This dual identity as both NGOs and mediators nicely sets them up with a unique agency to promote and diffuse norms. These norms often reflect the liberal peacebuilding paradigm promoted from the Global North, such as inclusion, gender equality and transitional justice, with the view that these norms are not ends in themselves but as necessary ingredients for effective mediation.The book further questions whether NGOs should promote norms in the first place. The outcome of the NCA process presents a critical and cautionary tale of promoting a presumed universal norm into a given locale and expecting a certain outcome without understanding how an external norm interacts with existing normative frameworks. The book illustrates that while NGO mediators do possess the “normative agency” to effectively promote norms to negotiating parties, my empirical research analyses how their promotion of the “inclusivity” norm to the negotiating parties in Myanmar’s NCA paradoxically resulted in exclusionary outcomes: only half of the armed groups in the ethnic armed groups’ negotiating bloc signed, and civil society was effectively crowded out from meaningful participation despite lofty rhetoric. This is an open access book.