Publisher Description

The field of conflict resolution has evolved dramatically during the relatively short duration of the discipline’s existence. Each generation of scholars has struggled with the major puzzles of their era, providing theories and solutions that meet the needs of the time, only to be pushed forward by new insights and, at times, totally upended by a changing world. This introductory course text explores the genealogy of the field of conflict resolution by examining three different epochs of the field, each one tied to the historical context and events of the day. In each of these epochs, scholars and practitioners worked to understand and address the conflicts that the world was facing, at that time. This book provides a framework that students will carry with them far into their careers, enriching their contributions and strengthening their voices. Rather than a didactic approach to the field, students will develop their critical analytical skills through an inductive inquiry. Students will broaden their vocabulary, grapple with argumentation, and develop critical reading skills.

This book clarifies some key ideas and practices underlying peacebuilding; understood broadly as formal and informal peace processes that occur during pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict transformation. Applicable to all peacebuilders, Elisabeth Porter highlights positive examples of women’s peacebuilding in comparative international contexts. She critically interrogates accepted and entrenched dualisms that prevent meaningful reconciliation, while also examining the harm of othering and the importance of recognition, inclusion and tolerance. Drawing on feminist ethics, the book develops a politics of compassion that defends justice, equality and rights and the need to restore victims’ dignity. Complex issues of memory, truth, silence and redress are explored while new ideas on reconciliation and embracing difference emerge. Many ideas challenge orthodox understandings of peace. The arguments developed here demonstrate how peacebuilding can be understood more broadly than current United Nations and orthodox usages so that women’s activities in conflict and transitional societies can be valued as participating in building sustainable peace with justice. Theoretically integrating peace and conflict studies, international relations, political theory and feminist ethics, this book focuses on the lessons to be learned from best practices of peacebuilding situated around the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Peacebuilding will be of particular interest to peace practitioners and to students and researchers of peace and conflict studies, international relations and gender politics.

With a view to deepening our understanding of sources of hatred and prejudice, this book uses a developmental and evolutionary perspective to explore and explain the process by which our beliefs are conveyed to the youngest members of society. Discussing the psychological obstacles to peaceful relations between groups, the authors focus on the developmental processes by which we can work to diminish ethnocentrism, prejudice, and hatred, which children learn from a very early age. Until now, scholarship and practice in international relations have gravely neglected crucial psychological aspects of these terrible problems and have not yet explored the educational opportunities related to them. Addressing these promising lines of inquiry and innovation, this book fosters a more humane and less violent development in childhood and adolescence. Educators, religious leaders, developmental and social psychologists, will find this a valuable resource, as will a socially concerned segment of the public who are looking for practical ways to work for peace.

At the start of 2014, more people were displaced globally by conflict and human rights violations than at any time since the Second World War. Although many of those displaced, from countries such as Syria, Iraq, Colombia, Kenya, and Sudan, have survived grave human rights abuses that demand redress, the links between forced migration, justice, and reconciliation have historically received little attention. This collection addresses the roles of various actors including governments, UN agencies, NGOs, and displaced persons themselves, raising complex questions about accountability for past injustices and how to support reconciliation in communities shaped by exile. Forced Migration, Reconciliation, and Justice draws on a variety of disciplinary perspectives including political science, law, anthropology, and social work. The chapters range from case studies in countries such as Bosnia, Cambodia, Lebanon, Turkey, East Timor, Kenya, and Canada, to macro-level analyses of trends, interconnections, and theoretical dilemmas. Furthermore, the authors explore the contribution of trials and truth commissions, as well as the role of religious practices, oral history, theatre, and social interactions in addressing justice and reconciliation issues in affected communities. In doing so, they provide fresh insight into emerging debates at the centre of forced migration and transitional justice. Exploring critical issues in political science and development studies, this provocative collaboration unites leading researchers, policymakers, human rights advocates, and aid workers to examine the theoretical and practical relationships between displacement, transitional justice, and reconciliation. Contributors include Ian B. Anderson (Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada), John Bell (Toledo International Center for Peace), Chaloka Beyani (London School of Economics), Mateja Celestina (Coventry University), Ayse Betül Çelik (Sabanci University), Mick Dumper (Exeter University), Roger Duthie (International Center for Transitional Justice), Huma Haider (University of Birmingham), Nancy Maroun (United Nations Development Programme Office in Lebanon), James Milner (Carleton University), Mike Molloy (University of Ottawa), Paige Morrow (Frank Bold), Lisa Ndejuru (Concordia University), Thien-Huong T. Ninh (California State University, Dominguez Hills), Anneke Smit (University of Windsor), Roberto Vidal López (Pontifica Universidad), Luiz Vieira (formerly with IOM), Nicole Waintraub (University of Ottawa), Jennifer Winstanley (lawyer).

Community ecology has undergone a transformation in recent years, from a discipline largely focused on processes occurring within a local area to a discipline encompassing a much richer domain of study, including the linkages between communities separated in space (metacommunity dynamics), niche and neutral theory, the interplay between ecology and evolution (eco-evolutionary dynamics), and the influence of historical and regional processes in shaping patterns of biodiversity. To fully understand these new developments, however, students continue to need a strong foundation in the study of species interactions and how these interactions are assembled into food webs and other ecological networks. This new edition fulfils the book's original aims, both as a much-needed up-to-date and accessible introduction to modern community ecology, and in identifying the important questions that are yet to be answered. This research-driven textbook introduces state-of-the-art community ecology to a new generation of students, adopting reasoned and balanced perspectives on as-yet-unresolved issues. Community Ecology is suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers seeking a broad, up-to-date coverage of ecological concepts at the community level.

In the context of ongoing or historical violence, people tell stories about what happened, who did what to whom and why. Yet frequently, the speaking of violence reproduces the social fractures and delegitimizes, again, those that struggle against their own marginalization. This speaking of violence deepens conflict and all too often perpetuates cycles of violence. Alternatively, sometimes people do not speak of the violence and it is erased, buried with the bodies that bear it witness. This reduces the capacity of the public to address issues emerging in the aftermath of violence and repression. This book takes the notion of "narrative" as foundational to conflict analysis and resolution. Distinct from conflict theories that rely on accounts of attitudes or perceptions in the heads of individuals, this narrative perspective presumes that meaning, structured and organized as narrative processes, is the location for both analysis of conflict, as well as intervention. But meaning is political, in that not all stories can be told, or the way they are told delegitimizes and erases others. Thus, the critical narrative theory outlined in this book offers a normative approach to narrative assessment and intervention. It provides a way of evaluating narrative and designing "better-formed" stories: "better" in that they are generative of sustainable relations, creating legitimacy for all parties. In so doing, they function aesthetically and ethically to support the emergence of new histories and new futures. Indeed, critical narrative theory offers a new lens for enabling people to speak of violence in ways that undermine the intractability of conflict