This article examines the possibility of establishing a Department of Peace (DOP) as a Department of the Government of Canada. The topic has been introduced in Parliament twice, as Bill C-447 in 2009 and as Bill C-373 in 2011, without any further actions beyond the formal First Reading. The introduction of the bills could only happen on the basis of significant support among Canadians. At present efforts to introduce the DOP continue, although in somewhat muted form. Based largely on oral interviews, this article assesses the potential for establishing a DOP in the context of the Canadian peace tradition as well as global developments. It concludes that a DOP has great potential to move the peace agenda forward but that, in view of the priorities of the current government and the general mood in Canadian society, it is not realistic to expect a DOP to be implemented at present.

There is little attempt by the Turkish government to end violence directed against queer people or to provide intervention and prevention services. This article explores the social and legal traditions that the Turkish state maintains to oppress the queer community and to prevent people from accessing their basic human needs. In order to understand violence orchestrated against Turkey’s queer people, it is important to explore some of the threats they face on an everyday basis. These threats include unemployment, harassment, discrimination, disowning/honor killings, denial of freedom of expression and freedom of association, and death. Finally, we explore the Gezi Park nonviolent protests as well as providing some important social change recommendations that Turkey must implement with international solidarity.

Critical and Emancipatory Theory (CET) of peacebuilding emerged as the sixth school of thought in Peace and Conflict Studies to critique the liberal and neoliberal approaches to peacebuilding. CET contends that liberal and neoliberal approaches to peacebuilding are discriminatory and biased, perpetrates the interest of Western elites, hinders the achievement of social justice, and considers the local as insignificant for peacebuilding. A call for the reformation of the liberal and neoliberal approaches necessitated the CET school of thought to outline certain principles and guidelines that could guide the practice of peace-building. Different methodologies, intervention strategies, principles and approaches that could guide praxis have therefore been advanced by scholars, researchers, and practitioners. This paper therefore examines and reflects on the multiplex methodologies in peacebuilding, the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach to understanding peace and peacebuilding, and the question of intervention in post-war peacebuilding, the principles that guide the implementation of peacebuilding from the lens of Critical and Emancipatory school of thought. This piece contend that CET approach may not be self-sufficient but would be the most appropriate way to decentralize the peacebuilding process and, as such, local or indigenous peacebuilding processes must be encouraged while acknowledging the salient role of the international community as well.

The paper examines the tension in the social construction of pandemic by doctors, traditional healers, and faith-based healers and considers the potential public health implications. Methodologically, the author uses a case study of Mwenezi District in Masvingo Province in Zimbabwe and draws on autoethnographic experiences to observe and analyse local level asymmetric confrontations as the Coronavirus pandemic unfolded. What emerges is how values, beliefs and scientific interpretations are contributing factors to conflict, and more significantly, the deleterious impact it has on mobilizing community action against the pandemic. Research findings reveal how untenable and inconceivable it will be to contain the pandemic without paying appropriate attention to apostolic sects and traditional healers. Interventions have so far ignored this social capital.

Though the heroic strides, accomplishments and sacrifices of many clerics who have led exemplary lives in the Catholic priesthood remain indelible, we are faced today with a preponderance of allegations and claims of clerical sexual abuse suggesting that both the Catholic Church and priesthood are experiencing crises of different kinds. Clerical sexual abuse is a contradiction of the life of chastity, one of the evangelical virtues which are corollaries of responding to the call to the Roman Catholic priesthood. How those evangelical virtues concern us and the needed critical family roles for addressing the challenges of clergy sexual abuse are often overlooked; but our lives are inter-connected. This article has been prompted by the need to see the other side of the problem, which is general huge family failures, and to awaken our consciences to assume our own responsibilities that would, by collective action, help to bring about positive and peaceful change.

The Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy promised to make America more competitive, to challenge China’s revisionist global agenda, and to push back against the new ‘gray zone’ conflicts of great power competition. Fundamentally, the strategy required the government to exercise a Whole of Government (WoG) approach to bring to bear all elements of national power. Despite wide-ranging calls for WoG, the administration eschewed basic reforms, destroyed interdepartmental trust networks, and over time expelled the conduits of national security, pushing WoG more thoroughly into the military. While departmental emphasis on Indo-Pacific issues took place in the Trump administration, this occurred largely in isolation of grand strategic goals.

The pursuit of accountability for perpetrators of mass violence is a significant aspect of peace negotiations. However, different groups often hold conflicting views on what justice means to them. While scholars increasingly discuss the contested nature of transitional justice processes, accountability continues to be seen as a relatively objective aspect of justice. However, examining the interpretations of accountability in the theory and practice of transitional justice reveals that the term often connotes very different meanings simultaneously, arousing conceptual dissonance. The paper argues that, unlike contestation, dissonance is characterized by a hidden or suppressed plurality of meaning, affecting the legitimacy and relevance of policy as well as the ability to pursue it coherently. The paper explores the conceptual dissonance around the notion of accountability in transitional justice broadly and its impact on the political and legal negotiations of accountability policies in the two cases studies of Liberia (2003-2009) and Uganda (2000-2007), with broader ramifications for the future of Jus post-Bellum.

While secessionists have had their dreams, both furtive and as announced intentions, throughout American history, we may be entering a period of increased fervor for various ideologically driven campaigns that either seek new state boundary shifts, annexation of portions of the US to Canada or other nation-states, or outright sovereignty as new nation-states. The contestation between perfervid far-right ideologues often associated with Donald Trump and a leftist eco-racial justice amalgam of groups and individuals mutually coalescing around complete separation is not unimaginable presently. There are also dreams and talk of complete independence for descendants of slaves and some indigenous tribes. What are the trends and tendencies in the world around these questions and how might they be expressing themselves in the US? If the culture wars militate separations, can we avoid a devolution into US Civil War 2.0?

Based on a qualitative method, this study narrates the condition and status of women workers engaged in the unorganized handicraft sector in Srinagar. The city, considered Kashmir’s economic hub and business capital, is known for handicrafts and tourism. In this study, 20 women involved in the Kashmiri handicrafts sector were interviewed face to face. The study recruited participants using purposive and snowball sampling methods. After a thorough review of the collected data, it was thematically interpreted. A descriptive phenomenology analysis of the dataset identified three themes: (i) role of conflict in the region, (ii) urge for economic independence, and (iii) social prejudice. This study argues that even though the work environment in the unorganized sector is exploitative and oppressive for women, there is an element of liberation for women in the social sphere.

“Reservation Policy: An Analysis of Scheduled Tribes Reservation on Higher Education in Manipur.” This paper examines how marginalized social groups are admitted to Manipur’s universities, notably Manipur University. In Manipur, the reservation proportion is as follows: unreserved 40%, economically weaker 10%, Scheduled Tribes (ST) 31%, Scheduled Castes (SC) 2%, and Other Backward Classes (OBC) (17%). This research focused on Manipur’s shortage of quota provisions in higher education admissions. Tribal peoples, who already have 31% of the reservation opportunity, were outraged by this. All ministries of the Indian Union Government have a 7.5% allocation for ST. However, the problem with these figures is that they are radically different from Manipur’s current demographic reality. The Indian Central Educational Institutions (CEI) Reservation in Admission Act, 2006, as revised in 2012, is also the basis for the paper.

The general consequentialist argument for the global education of girls is examined with a view toward explicating the necessity of sensitivity to cultural factors. The work of Nussbaum, Chen and Yousafzai is alluded to, and it is concluded that educational work for girls and women cannot meaningfully be done without some advertence to local cultural standards, even if they seem restrictive.

This paper presents a curricular justification for teaching undergraduate college students in the United States about the practice of management. This justification turns on a conception of management as the routine, daily practice of seeking just relationships between an organization and distinct constituents of that organization. This search is an act of essay, the verb. With this interpretation of managerial practice as routine justice inquiry, I convene teachers from dozens of academic disciplines in a hypothetical endeavor to re-purpose managerial practice for purposes of General Education teaching. The resulting justification is an alternative to the customary defense that teaching about business and management enhances a college’s cash flow through substantial enrollments in those classes, a defense that stops well short of anything intellectual, much less curricular.

How to transcend the conceptual walls of war? How to bring together former enemies? This paper looks at Victus, a theatre group in which victims and former combatants of different armed groups in Colombia (guerrilla, paramilitary, army) united in and off the stage, in a reconciliation process mediated through art. It will sustain that this configures a sort of micro-“laboratory” of reconciliation: a common space of interaction that has allowed different actors to transcend the borders of armed conflict, to humanize the “other”, and to generate multiple processes of transformation and peacebuilding, which, despite being imperfect, are meaningful.

The paper examines the contentions and contestations over the anti-influx bills passed in 2015 by the legislature of India’s northeastern state of Manipur. Passed in the backdrop of the demand from the state’s valley-dwelling majority Meitei community for a legal framework to regulate influx of “outsiders”, the bills evoked hostile reception from the hill-dwelling tribal communities. This paper sees the contestations that ensued over the bills as an emanation of the enduring hill-valley divide in the state. The bills’ contents and various provisions, as explicated in the paper, bear the weighty imprint of the majoritarian impulses that seek to erode the extant institutional and legal safeguards for tribals. This unsettles the tribals who perceive the bills as a trespass in their distinctive constitutional status. The paper concludes by underlining the import of a cautious public policy making, lending agency to the tribals and a deliberative policy-making processes.

This article examines cross border resource management and how the practice affects sustainable peace in eastern Africa. It explores ways of coping with resource scarcity; examines necessary reforms and highlights holistic resource management paradigm in support of sustainable peace. Due to insufficient targeted research to generate information to multilaterally mitigate policy gaps and inform interventions on continued degradation and recurrence of resource-induced conflicts; this article consolidates knowledge towards sustainable management of shared resources to avert conflicts due to increased resource demands, structural inequalities and competition. Ensuing peace provides grounds for unlocking more opportunities and synergies towards greater regional progression. Resource scarcity perspective is used in a descriptive approach with a sample of 385 engaged through self-administered questionnaires. Findings show weak compliance and enforcement of relevant regulations, dissimilar resource management practices across borders, inadequate financing of programmes, over-dependency on resources and non-holistic approaches as main contributors to the diminishing resource base amid population growth, resource competition and conflicts. Thus, well managed resources promise stable livelihoods, economic wellness and further help avert competition and disagreements.

By relying on the methods of classical experiment, journal keeping, and focus group interview, using a random opportunistic sample of twenty students in Yaoundé, Cameroon, this mixed methods research examined how sustained practices of self-examination over a week translated into peacemaking within the lives of the self-examinants and in their social interactions. The findings of the study showed that daily routine practice of self-examination would contribute to enhancing the self-examinants’ capacities for peacemaking.

LGBT describes those who are drawn to other LGBT individuals. These individuals identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In India, homosexuality is nothing new. India is regarded as a nation that embraces and accepts all cultures and customs. However, Indian society is still conservative when it comes to tolerating homosexuality in the general population, and despite the fact that the LGBT community is widely accepted around the world, we still do not wish to embrace LGBT individuals in our ostensibly modern society. In India, sexual minorities are frequently the targets of hate crimes. They are taken advantage of verbally, physically, and sexually since they are easy prey. In order to better understand the LGBTQ community and treat them with respect and dignity rather than labelling them, this study presents a brief summary of the LGBTQ community as well as other glossaries and words of the same group. This review demonstrates social problems like stigma and discrimination, which are still widespread in our Indian society even after the passage of Act 377. It also demonstrates how stigma and discrimination cause mental health problems in people, which in turn lead to suicide because of the severity of their mental health issues.