This book shows that the conflict resolution field often denies difference even as it attempts to implement a progressive and responsive politics. Innovative theoretical analysis suggests ways of responding anew across difference and beyond dominant ways of thinking about political community and conflict.
Managing Politics and Conflict in Projects is an easy-to-read, no-nonsense guide that walks you through the “soft” issues of project management, including communicating, negotiating, and influencing skills that are vital to your project success. Understand your organization's political climate and culture and ascend the corporate ladder to the next level as a project manager. Learn how to deal with political issues requiring complex organizational and interpersonal skills, using valuable review points, tips, and a fictional narrative illustrating the book's main points. •Improve and develop your leadership, interpersonal, and communications skills •Negotiate your political environment •Acknowledge and overcome challenges inherent in project management •Enhance your career by effectively utilizing politics and conflict •Recognize and interpret the barriers of communication •Be prepared to enter into a negotiation •Overcome cultural challenges
In this edited volume, experts on conflict resolution examine the impact of the crises triggered by the coronavirus and official responses to it. The pandemic has clearly exacerbated existing social and political conflicts, but, as the book argues, its longer-term effects open the door to both further conflict escalation and dramatic new opportunities for building peace. In a series of short essays combining social analysis with informed speculation, the contributors examine the impact of the coronavirus crisis on a wide variety of issues, including nationality, social class, race, gender, ethnicity, and religion. They conclude that the period of the pandemic may well constitute a historic turning point, since the overall impact of the crisis is to destabilize existing social and political systems. Not only does this systemic shakeup produce the possibility of more intense and violent conflicts, but also presents new opportunities for advancing the related causes of social justice and civic peace. This book will be of great interest to students of peace studies, conflict resolution, public policy and International Relations.
This book offers new insights into the close relationship between political discourses and conflict resolution through critical analysis of the role of discursive change in a peace process. Just as a peace process has many dimensions and stakeholders, so the discourses considered here come from a wide range of sources and actors. The book contains in-depth analyses of official discourses used to present the peace process, the discourses of political party leaders engaging (or otherwise) with it, the discourses of community-level activists responding to it, and the discourses of the media and the academy commenting on it. These discourses reflect varying levels of support for the peace process – from obstruction to promotion – and the role of language in moving across this spectrum according to issue and occasion. Common to all these analyses is the conviction that the language used by political protagonists and cultural stakeholders has a profound effect on progression towards peace. Bringing together leading experts on Northern Ireland’s peace process from a range of academic disciplines, including political science, sociology, linguistics, history, geography, law, and peace studies, this book offers new insights into the discursive dynamics of violent political conflict and its resolution.
For several decades the debate over collective security -- the idea that alliances are problematic and that all nations should pledge to come to the aid of any nation that is a victim of aggression -- has been polarized. Collective Conflict Management and Changing World Politics probes the international and domestic conditions under which collective security tends to work or not, and questions if the end of the Cold War makes success more or less likely than before. The contributors conclude that collective conflict management is possible under specific situations, as they enumerate various domestic and international requisites that circumscribe such possibilities. "This is an excellent collection. The material is of a uniformly high quality along three dimensions: good writing, identification of important empirical problems relating to collective security and peacekeeping (or, using the term the volume authors prefer, collective conflict management), and good, logical reasoning.
This book suggests a new explanation for why international peace interventions often fail to reach their full potential. Based on several years of ethnographic research in conflict zones around the world, it demonstrates that everyday elements - such as the expatriates' social habits and usual approaches to understanding their areas of operation - strongly influence peacebuilding effectiveness. Individuals from all over the world and all walks of life share numerous practices, habits, and narratives when they serve as interveners in conflict zones. These common attitudes and actions enable foreign peacebuilders to function in the field, but they also result in unintended consequences that thwart international efforts. Certain expatriates follow alternative modes of thinking and acting, often with notable results, but they remain in the minority. Through an in-depth analysis of the interveners' everyday life and work, this book proposes innovative ways to better help host populations build a sustainable peace.
This is the first integrated survey of conflict resolution since the Cold War, offering an ideal introduction to the subject and an authoritative assessment of its current stage of development.
This book examines the dynamics of relations and the substance of the negotiations between the international community and Iran over the latter's nuclear programme. Iran’s nuclear programme and the alleged threat to international peace and security remains one of the most important issues in the United States, as well as in European foreign affairs. In the US, Iran has dominated the political discourse for over three decades and Europe has spent considerable political capital in finding a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. While relations between both states remain subject to mutual hostility, the EU remains a channel of communication and since 2003 has maintained a multilateral negotiation framework. By and large, the narrative on nuclear negotiations is dominated by constructivist and realist literature, portraying relations between the US and Iran in ideological terms as a prolonged struggle for regional influence. Embedded within conflict resolution and diplomatic theory, this work attempts to bridge this gap. Drawing upon primary documents and interviews, the text examines negotiation behaviour, and strategies and tools of statecraft, as well as analysing technical aspects of initiatives concerning the nuclear programme. This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, international diplomacy, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and IR in general.
African nations have watched the recent civic dramas of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street asking if they too will see similar civil society actions in their own countries. Nigeria—Africa’s most populous nation—has long enjoyed one of the continent’s most vibrant civil society spheres, which has been instrumental in political change. Initially viewed as contributing to democracy’s development, however, civil society groups have come under increased scrutiny by scholars and policymakers. Do some civil society groups promote democracy more effectively than others? And if so, which ones, and why? By examining the structure, organizational cultures, and methods of more than one hundred Nigerian civil society groups, Kew finds that the groups that best promote democratic development externally are themselves internally democratic. Specifically, the internally democratic civil society groups build more sustainable coalitions to resist authoritarian rule; support and influence political parties more effectively; articulate and promote public interests in a more negotiable fashion; and, most importantly, inculcate democratic norms in their members, which in turn has important democratizing impacts on national political cultures and institutions. Further, internally democratic groups are better able to resolve ethnic differences and ethnic-based tensions than their undemocratically structured peers. This book is a deeply comprehensive account of Nigerian civil society groups in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Kew blends democratic theory with conflict resolution methodologies to argue that the manner in which groups—and states—manage internal conflicts provides an important gauge as to how democratic their political cultures are. The conclusions will allow donors and policymakers to make strategic decisions in their efforts to build a democratic society in Nigeria and other regions.