This chapter identifies some of the broader effects of the social and legal invisibility of aesthetically unfamiliar atrocity processes beyond merely adding to the so-called impunity gap that afflicts international criminal justice. It does so by demonstrating how aesthetic biases favoring horrifically spectacular crimes not only undermines the goals and values ascribed to ICL itself, but also contributes to a variety of negative outcomes that go far beyond missed prosecutorial opportunities. ICL’s myopic focus on horrifically spectacular crimes raises a host of troubling questions concerning what harms are prioritized and whose interests are served by international criminal justice. This chapter considers some of these implications, specifically those relating to theories of punishment, and ICL’s role in shaping historical memory, how transitional justice, peacebuilding, human rights issues are framed and pursued, along with global justice more broadly.

This chapter introduces the study and its approach to examining African peacekeeping. The book is framed around two central arguments. The first is the importance of emphasising and understanding historical legacies and the European colonial enterprise when exploring and analysing African peacekeeping. The second is that African peacekeeping is best understood through the lens of practice theory, an approach which allows the authors to demonstrate just how deeply embedded in both domestic and foreign policy-making peacekeeping has become across the continent over time. The introduction then goes on to outline the data and source material which the book draws on – which includes over ten years’ worth of fieldwork data collected by the authors – and provides a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book’s structure and argument.

This chapter explores the evolution of the governance of so-called “fragile states” as a case of change in the architecture of global governance. Reduced funding from states and broader ideational trends about managerialism and effectiveness have rendered international organizations (IOs) less important in defining policy responses and assigning roles to other actors. This change in the governance architecture has engendered more networked and market-based forms of governance, with different stripes of professional networks becoming more important. The chapter argues that this transformation helps explain substantive changes in how fragile states are governed: in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the treatment of fragile states was dominated by a “peacebuilding” approach focused on building institutions to support the rule of law and democracy, and with IOs such as the UN and the World Bank in authoritative roles. Gradually, over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, this approach became bifurcated, which reflects the prominence of professional networks and the reduced authority of IOs to define an overarching framework: military professionals in states advanced “stabilization” and counterterrorism – focused on fighting insurgents and conducting anti-terrorism operations – while networks consisting of humanitarian and human rights professionals advanced a focus on protection of civilians.

This chapter reflects on the implications of resilience thinking for transitional justice as a transformative process that contributes to adaptive peacebuilding. It discusses how the concept creates space for new thinking about transitional justice and the potential dangers and opportunities afforded by a resilience approach. As part of this analysis, the chapter provides a critical appraisal of the overall approach to transitional justice that has dominated the field, considering transformative justice as an alternative perspective that challenges the hegemonic politico-legal, state-based, backward-looking retributive framework. It argues that resilience thinking supports a greater focus on psychosocial, community-based, forward-looking restorative approaches to transitional justice, consistent with the transformative turn in the field. It demonstrates this by exploring different understandings of justice, how they are pursued in the context of transitional justice and what they mean for building resilient societies after mass violence and human rights violations. The chapter further examines how various transitional justice mechanisms might contribute to individual, community and systemic societal resilience, while also recognising their limitations.

This chapter explores the tensions between resilience models of recovery, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice by examining the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, its aftermath and the country’s recovery processes. Rwanda has been lauded as a success story for post-genocide recovery, peacebuilding and transitional justice. Yet, a closer look demonstrates that its recovery and peacebuilding reinforced a centralised state and the ruling party’s dominance. These processes produced the appearance of stability and resilience while hiding new hierarchies and social divides that risk generating conflict in the future. Adaptive peacebuilding efforts led by local non-governmental organisations, on the other hand, responded directly to ordinary people’s immediate needs without promoting political agendas. Government-led transitional justice efforts often disrupted these local successes and ultimately benefitted the nation-state at the expense of community healing. The lessons learned from the Rwanda case point to the importance of tending to local-level concerns in recovery processes and of employing peacebuilding approaches that focus on broad notions of positive peace instead of only state-building. In addition, resilience models of recovery must consider micro- and macro-level concerns and pay attention to the impact of political power on outcomes.

In the aftermath of the more than twenty-year armed conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government, northern Uganda has become a transitional justice laboratory. In response to widespread human rights violations perpetrated by both the rebels and government soldiers, various peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms have been put into place. However, many of them are top-down and externally-driven, inaccessible to rural communities and/or irresponsive to diverse experiences and post-conflict needs. In this vacuum of post-conflict assistance, different alternative avenues have emerged at the micro level that ultimately enable war-affected communities to engage with their subjective experiences on their own terms. This chapter specifically focuses on the role of survivors’ support groups. It shows how different types of survivors’ groups, in a creative and participatory manner, enable survivors’ agency and craft spaces for healing, justice making and peace-building, shaped by survivors’ own experiences and needs. Support groups thereby aid survivors in developing adaptive capacities to positively respond to shocks and stressors resulting from mass violence. In this way, these groups also contribute to fostering individual and community resilience.

This chapter provides seventeen recommendations intended to improve PeaceComm practice worldwide.

The first six recommendations suggest continuing the Sesame Workshop design. The remainder provide a design template for Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street and other future cross-comparative PeaceComm interventions around the globe. Where relevant, these range from weaving in structural inequality realities and relative narrative approaches to conflict contexts, varying intervention designs by world system categorical target populations, treating children as active human beings when they are the target of interventions and only targeting them if indeed treating them more like adults, developing direct and ongoing relations with communication and peace and conflict scholars, structuring interpersonal communication, treating communication as a process not only product, continuing the use of the embedded factor of production effects model, conceptualizing communication also as a mediating artifact, and cultivating the bicultural “target” of an intervention to be peace-maker mediators-in-the-making. In the case of these conflicts, that means incorporating peacebuilding into child development approaches for Arab/Palestinian Israeli children out of an aim to empower their active future mediation roles

Explores the emerging subdiscipline of Peace Communication (PeaceComm), beginning with a discussion about the history of the practice, and the author’s ongoing quest to introduce a subdiscipline, dedicated to assessing and evaluating the critical efficacy of the practice. A methodological template for comparative global assessment and evaluation is offered, stressing the need to prioritize political conflict data and conflict zones-based context analyses, given that political conflict is caused by collective grievances related to “group”-level disadvantages and perceived disadvantages, not individual prejudice. The template is operationalized through the assessment of Sesame Street interventions into the Israeli Palestinian ethnopolitical nationalist conflict, drawn from field work in 2001, 2004-2006, and 2011. Best practices and other interdisciplinary contributions for practitioners are recommended, to understand conflict intractability where socialization, culture, and inter-“group” (mediated and interpersonal) communication intersect in glocalized conflict zone contexts, and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically. The interventions targeted children, who comprise the majority within conflict zones. The model used, mediated contact effects, is one of seven models and six subtypes of PeaceComm practiced historically worldwide the author has previously categorized, and is one of those most in need of PeaceComm scholarship, with potential to succeed but scarce evidence collected about its efficacy.

Social unrest and warfare in emerging markets can create opportunities for innovation. By focusing on Colombia, where armed conflict and post-conflict challenges have motivated innovation in the military and business domains, this chapter examines innovation in places where social demands create opportunities for deep societal transformations. We describe the processes by which the armed forces developed innovative military strategies in wartime to win an unconventional and long-standing guerrilla war. During the post-conflict period, businesses created new business models, going much further than traditional practices of social responsibility to become real actors in building a peaceful society and contributing to the economic development of regions historically affected by the armed conflict.