Chronicles the peace process negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

In Between the Sword and the Wall: The Santos Peace Negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Harvey Kline, a noted expert on contemporary Colombian politics, brings to a close his multivolume chronicle of the incessant violence that has devastated Colombia’s population, politics, and military for decades. This, his newest work on the subject, recounts and analyzes the negotiations between Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which ended with a peace agreement in 2016.
 
The FARC insurgency began in 1964, and every Colombian president after 1980 unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the group. Kline analyzes how the Santos administration was ultimately able to negotiate peace with the FARC. The agreement failed to receive the approval of the Colombian people in an October 2016 plebiscite, but a renegotiated version was later approved by the congress in the same year. Afterward, more than 7,000 rebels turned over their weapons to the UN mission in Colombia. The former combatants were then to be judged by a special court empowered to punish but not imprison those who had violated human rights. Throughout the book, Kline emphasizes the dual nature of the Santos negotiations, first with the FARC and second with the democratic opposition to the agreement led by former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.
 
Kline provides readers with a well-researched analysis based on a variety of resources, including media articles and primary documents from the government, international organizations, and the FARC. He also conducted extensive interviews with twenty-eight government officials and Colombian experts from all ideological persuasions.

This book provides the first detailed examination of the role played by former loyalist and republican prisoners in grass roots conflict transformation work in the Northern Ireland peace process. It challenges the assumed passivity of former prisoners and ex-combatants. Instead, it suggests that such individuals and the groups which they formed have been key agents of conflict transformation. They have provided leadership in challenging cultures of violence, developed practical methods of resolving inter-communal conflict and found ways for communities to explore their troubled past. In analysing this, the authors challenge the sterile demonisation of former prisoners and the processes that maintain their exclusion from normal civic and social life.

The book is a constructive reminder of the need for full participation of both former combatants and victims in post-conflict transformation. It also lays out a new agenda for reconciliation which suggests that conflict transformation can and should begin ‘from the extremes’.

The book will be of interest to students of criminology, peace and conflict studies, law and politics, geography and sociology as well as those with a particular interest in the Northern Ireland conflict.

Drawing on a newly developed theoretical definition of “missed opportunity,” Chances for Peace uses extensive sources in English, Hebrew, and Arabic to systematically measure the potentiality levels of opportunity across some ninety years of attempted negotiations in the Arab-Israeli conflict. With enlightening revelations that defy conventional wisdom, this study provides a balanced account of the most significant attempts to forge peace, initiated by the world’s superpowers, the Arabs (including the Palestinians), and Israel. From Arab-Zionist negotiations at the end of World War I to the subsequent partition, the aftermath of the 1967 War and the Sadat Initiative, and numerous agreements throughout the 1980s and 1990s, concluding with the Annapolis Conference in 2007 and the Abu Mazen-Olmert talks in 2008, pioneering scholar Elie Podeh uses empirical criteria and diverse secondary sources to assess the protagonists’ roles at more than two dozen key junctures.

A resource that brings together historiography, political science, and the practice of peace negotiation, Podeh’s insightful exploration also showcases opportunities that were not missed. Three agreements in particular (Israeli-Egyptian, 1979; Israeli-Lebanese, 1983; and Israeli-Jordanian, 1994) illuminate important variables for forging new paths to successful negotiation. By applying his framework to a broad range of power brokers and time periods, Podeh also sheds light on numerous incidents that contradict official narratives. This unique approach is poised to reshape the realm of conflict resolution.

Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-first Centuryis not only an essential introduction for students and scholars, it is a must-have guide for the men and women entrusted with creating stability and security in our changing world.

This book examines the model developed in the Scandinavian countries for handling labor market relations between employers and employees—a model that has secured flexible and well-functioning labor market relations with comparatively high remuneration in case of sickness or unemployment. Consensual—and comparatively efficient—policies have likewise been pursued in agricultural, industrial, environmental policies, and in many policies related to public services.

The preconditions for these policies are strong civil societies, that is, strong capacities for collective mobilization and collective action among groups, relatively strong unitary states, and high levels of generalized trust. The institutional apparatus of these consensual policies has been labeled corporatism. Scandinavian corporatism has implied consent to a norm of affected interests. Groups that are supposedly affected by state policies have access to the processes leading up to political decision-making and are involved in the implementation of policies. This access often has public commissions or committees charged with preparing political decisions and delivering advice, as well as policy implementation committees.

Corporatist and consensual policymaking come at a price. The exchange between interest groups (in pursuit of policy influence) and state actors (in pursuit of information and political support from groups) tends to be time-consuming and confined to solutions that are accepted by all actors. Corporatist policies are consequently not very conducive to more radical reforms. After the heyday of corporatist policymaking in the 1970s, all the Scandinavian countries have loosened their corporatist structures to pave the way for reforms.

In a very short time, individuals and companies have harnessed cyberspace to create new industries, a vibrant social space, and a new economic sphere that are intertwined with our everyday lives. At the same time, individuals, subnational groups, and governments are using cyberspace to advance interests through malicious activity. Terrorists recruit, train, and target through the Internet, hackers steal data, and intelligence services conduct espionage. Still, the vast majority of cyberspace is civilian space used by individuals, businesses, and governments for legitimate purposes.

Cyberspace and National Security brings together scholars, policy analysts, and information technology executives to examine current and future threats to cyberspace. They discuss various approaches to advance and defend national interests, contrast the US approach with European, Russian, and Chinese approaches, and offer new ways and means to defend interests in cyberspace and develop offensive capabilities to compete there. Policymakers and strategists will find this book to be an invaluable resource in their efforts to ensure national security and answer concerns about future cyberwarfare.

Imitating the desire of others is inherent to the struggle for power in international politics. The imitation of desire is a human trait seldom recognized in International Relations studies, let alone conceptualized. The imitation of desire that takes place among entities—as opposed to being intentionally generated by them—challenges the conventional wisdom of International Relations that assumes rational autonomous individuals. This book identifies the root of Realism, pointing out its awareness of the conflicting impact of desire and imitation in a world driven by restless comparison. It subsequently demonstrates the conceptual value of mimetic theory while proposing a template of understanding international polities, starting from assumptions of disorder and violence. This volume not only contributes to the study of conflict based on the imitation of the desire of others among international polities, but also proposes in its conceptualization that it is worth looking at studies of agency and structure, normative change, peace, and reconciliation.

Three scenarios for future approaches to peace and conflict diplomacy, explored through the lens of regional perspectives and security threats

Diplomacy in pursuit of peace and security faces severe challenges not seen in decades. The reemergence of strong states, discord in the UN Security Council, destabilizing transnational nonstate actors, closing space for civil society within states, and the weakening of the international liberal order all present new obstacles to diplomacy.

In Diplomacy and the Future of World Order, an international group of experts confronts these challenges to peace and conflict diplomacy—defined as the effort to manage others’ conflicts, cope with great power competition, and deal with threats to the state system itself. In doing so, they consider three potential scenarios for world order where key states decide to go it alone, return to a liberal order, or collaborate on a case-by-case basis to address common threats and problems.

These three scenarios are then evaluated through the prism of regional perspectives from around the world and for their potential ramifications for major security threats including peacekeeping, nuclear nonproliferation, cyber competition, and terrorism. Editors Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall conclude the volume by identifying emerging types of diplomacy that may form the foundation for global peacemaking and conflict management in an uncertain future.

Based on a qualitative, ethnographic, observational case study approach, Environmental Preservation and the Grey Cliffs Conflictpresents an analysis of the conflict negotiation between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a local community that struggled to address a deteriorating Corps-managed recreational lake area in Tennessee known as “Grey Cliffs.” Viewing the dispute from the perspective of a new member of the community and a specialist in technical communication and professional writing, Kristin Pickering provides a unique perspective on this communication process.
 
Though environmental degradation and unauthorized use threatened the Grey Cliffs recreational lake area to the point that the Corps considered closure, community members valued it highly and wanted to keep it open. The community near this damaged and crime-ridden area needed help rejuvenating its landscape and image, but the Corps and community were sharply divided on how to maintain this beloved geographic space because of the stakeholders’ different cultural backgrounds and values, as well as the narratives used to discuss them. By co-constructing and aligning narratives, values, and ethos over time—a difficult and lengthy process—the Corps and community succeeded, and Grey Cliffs remains open to all. Focusing on field notes, participant interviews, and analysis of various texts created throughout the conflict, Pickering applies rhetorical analysis and a grounded theory approach to regulation, identity, sustainability, and community values to analyze this communication process.
 
Illustrating the positive change that can occur when governmental organizations and rural communities work together to construct shared values and engage in a rhetoric of relationship that preserves the environment, Environmental Preservation and the Grey Cliffs Conflict provides key recommendations for resolving environmental conflicts within local communities, especially for those working in technical and professional communication, organizational communication, environmental science, and public policy.
 

The proliferation of “minilateral” summits is reshaping how international security problems are addressed, yet these summits remain a poorly understood phenomenon. In this groundbreaking work, Kjell Engelbrekt contrasts the most important minilateral summits—the G7 (formerly G8) and G20—with the older and more formal UN Security Council to assess where the diplomacy of international security is taking place and whether these institutions complement or compete with each other.

Engelbrekt’s research in primary-source documents of the G7, G8, G20, and UN Security Council provides unique insight into how these institutions deliberate on three policy areas: conflict management, counterterrorism cooperation, and climate change mitigation. Relatively informal and flexible, GX diplomacy invites more countries to take a seat at the table and allows nontraditional security threats to be placed on the agenda. Engelbrekt concludes, however, that there is a continuing need for institutions like the UN to address traditional security problems.

High-Table Diplomacy will provoke discussion and further research on the role of minilateral summits among scholars of international relations, security studies, and international organizations.

The Horn of Africa, comprising Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, is the most conflict-ridden region in Africa. This book explores the origins and impact of these conflicts at both an intra-state and inter-state level and the insecurity they create.

The contributors show how regional and international interventions have compounded pre-existing tensions and have been driven by competing national interests linked to the 'War on Terror' and acts of piracy off the coast of Somalia.

The Horn of Africa outlines proposals for multidimensional mechanisms for conflict resolution in the region. Issues of border demarcation, democratic deficit, crises of nation and state building, and the roles of political actors and traditional authorities are all clearly analysed.

Negotiating a peaceful end to civil wars, which often includes an attempt to bring together former rival military or insurgent factions into a new national army, has been a frequent goal of conflict resolution practitioners since the Cold War. In practice, however, very little is known about what works, and what doesn’t work, in bringing together former opponents to build a lasting peace.

Contributors to this volume assess why some civil wars result in successful military integration while others dissolve into further strife, factionalism, and even renewed civil war. Eleven cases are studied in detail—Sudan, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, Rwanda, the Philippines, South Africa, Mozambique, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burundi—while other chapters compare military integration with corporate mergers and discuss some of the hidden costs and risks of merging military forces. New Armies from Old fills a serious gap in our understanding of civil wars, their possible resolution, and how to promote lasting peace, and will be of interest to scholars and students of conflict resolution, international affairs, and peace and security studies.

Trends in the number and scope of peace operations since 2000 evidence heightened international appreciation for their value in crisis-response and regional stabilization. Peace Operations: Trends, Progress, and Prospects addresses national and institutional capacities to undertake such operations, by going beyond what is available in previously published literature.

Part one focuses on developments across regions and countries. It builds on data- gathering projects undertaken at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies (CPASS), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) that offer new information about national contributions to operations and about the organizations through which they make those contributions. The information provides the bases for arriving at unique insights about the characteristics of contributors and about the division of labor between the United Nations and other international entities.

Part two looks to trends and prospects within regions and nations. Unlike other studies that focus only on regions with well-established track records—specifically Europe and Africa—this book also looks to the other major areas of the world and poses two questions concerning them: If little or nothing has been done institutionally in a region, why not? What should be expected?

This groundbreaking volume will help policymakers and academics understand better the regional and national factors shaping the prospects for peace operations into the next decade.

Somalia has been devastated by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion and years of civil war, and it has long been without a central government. Against this background of violence, Somali academic Afyare Abdi Elmi, attempts to explain the multiple dimensions of the conflict and find a peace-building consensus.

Somalia is a failed state and a Muslim state. This combination means the West assumes that it will become a breeding ground for extremism. The country regularly hits the headlines as a piracy hotspot. This combination of internal division and outside interference makes for an intensely hostile landscape. Elmi shows that only by addressing the problem of the statelessness in the country can the long process of peace begin. He highlights clan identities, Islam and other countries in the region as the key elements in any peace-building effort.

This unique account from an author who truly understands Somalia should be required reading for students and academics of international relations and peace / conflict studies.

Effective peace agreements are rarely accomplished by idealists. The process of moving from situations of entrenched oppression, armed conflict, open warfare, and mass atrocities toward peace and reconciliation requires a series of small steps and compromises to open the way for the kind of dialogue and negotiation that make political stability, the beginning of democracy, and the rule of law a possibility.

For over forty years, Charles Villa-Vicencio has been on the front lines of Africa's battle for racial equality. In Walk with Us and Listen, he argues that reconciliation needs honest talk to promote trust building and enable former enemies and adversaries to explore joint solutions to the cause of their conflicts. He offers a critical assessment of the South African experiment in transitional justice as captured in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and considers the influence of ubuntu, in which individuals are defined by their relationships, and other traditional African models of reconciliation. Political reconciliation is offered as a cautious model against which transitional politics needs to be measured. Villa-Vicencio challenges those who stress the obligation to prosecute those allegedly guilty of gross violation of human rights, replacing this call with the need for more complementarity between the International Criminal Court and African mechanisms to achieve the greater goals of justice and peace building.

Who Intervenes? takes as a given that there are tensions among ethnic groups throughout the world. But it is not at all clear when and why these tensions escalate into violence. The likelihood and character of intervention depend upon the interplay of two factors: ethnic composition and institutional constraint. A fourfold typology is produced. For example, states with high constraints and ethnic diversity are likely to intervene only for reasons related to national interests, while states with both ethnic dominance and low constraint are most disposed to intervene. The disposition to intervene is catalyzed, the authors hypothesize, by the presence of ethnic affinity and cleavage.

The book includes a comparative analysis of five case studies: India and Sri Lanka, Somalia and Ethiopia, Malaysia and the Thai Malay (a non-intervention), the immediate aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, and Greece and Turkey with Cyprus. The case histories produce strong support for the relevance of the typology and catalysts. Ethnic composition, institutional constraint, and ethnic affinity and cleavage are very useful factors in distinguishing both the likelihood and form of intervention.

Policies that encourage institutional reform and support ethnic diversity can be expected to reduce the likelihood and even the perceived need for intervention.