This paper is about African conflicts and their tendency to persist despite attempts to resolve them. Such persistence has in the past been attributed to various causes but it is the contention of this paper that African conflicts fester due to poor governance and thereafter persist and recur because the issues that led to the conflict are not adequately addressed in the course of resolving the conflict. To justify this position, the paper attempts a classification and analysis of what it considers to be recurring patterns in the conflict processes of some post-independence African states and also attempts a classification and analysis of efforts at resolving them. It argues that the expedient is often promoted over equity in the management of African conflicts and that mediators and facilitators routinely disregard the underlying issues of the conflict in their haste to abstract an agreement from the parties. It posits that some of the compromises that are extracted from the parties fail to meet their basic expectations and thus force them into a temporary peace that is abandoned at the earliest opportunity. The paper concludes that lasting peace is only feasible when issues of justice and equity are given priority of place and the parties are accorded sustained assistance as they embark on national reconciliation.

As a site of historic preservation, the “Hezbollah Museum,” as the Mleeta Resistance Landmark in South Lebanon is often called, engages in rhetorical invention on multiple levels: 1) generating a partisan story about the complicated, ongoing war between factions Mleeta calls the Zionists and the Resistance; and 2) creating a public space for the performance of persuasive political discourse about the resistance as an empowered, efficient, successful, and righteous social movement. The rhetorical utterances generated at Mleeta serve propaganda, prowar, sectarian ends, to be sure, but that rhetoric is also rooted in an increasingly neoliberal ideology and surrounded by neoliberal trappings, which creates a striking juxtaposition of gloss and extremism.

Power-sharing agreements, despite their disappointing history, are still the prevailing tool used for diffusing intrastate conflicts in Africa. One element that requires additional analysis is the role of third-parties in power-sharing negotiations. An analysis of the role of France in power-sharing negotiations in Chad, Mali, Central African Republic, Rwanda, and the Ivory Coast, suggests a biased approach that harmed the outcomes and sustainability of those negotiations. A better approach is to increase the power of third-parties like the African Union (AU). Currently, this organization lacks the executive capacity to guarantee the implementation of power-sharing negotiations. Empowering the AU’s executive arm through the formation of a military force, should allow for enhanced capacity in power-sharing negotiations.

This mixed-method design aimed to determine how practicing mindfulness in a high school classroom influences students’ academic focus and affective experience. Thirty-nine tenth-grade students participated in an eight-week intervention, in which they practiced mindfulness activities led by their certified English and yoga teacher once per week. Students completed a pre- and posttest Likert-scale survey to measure mindfulness using Greco, Baer, and Smith’s Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM) as well as three, open-ended post-test reflection questions. The survey data were analyzed to assess change in mindfulness and change in focus, and the qualitative data were analyzed to understand students’ self-perceptions of their affective experience. Results show that students’ scores for both mindfulness and focus increased after the intervention and they also show that students made gains in self-knowledge. The findings provide implications for educators to improve their classroom environments and reduce their own stress.

Scholars of transitional societies argue that reconciling different narratives of the past is important to progressing toward reconciliation more generally. This article uses this argument as a starting point to explore the distinct narratives/memories of Monsignor Romero’s assassination that exist in the public sphere. The human rights community and left-leaning press’s memory of Romero is deep. This sector remembers the indisputable facts of the assassination—who, what, where, when—but also those things that the right disputes—by whom and why. The right’s memory, by contrast, acknowledges only the most basic facts of the assassination while avoiding questions of causality and blame. This points to a continued lack of reconciliation in El Salvador. Using Romero’s assassination to explore views on reconciliation, this article argues that it is clear that the reconciled version of the violent past exists in a country transitioning away from conflict must be detailed and deep.

One of the defining marks of civil society rests upon the belief that individuals participate in the public square. The public square or civil society is a vast, intermingled body of interaction among institutions and individuals who wish to positively influence society. What I wish to assert is that a paradigmatic individual, the junzi, from a Confucian perspective, will offer a different vantage point in analyzing the complexity of civil society, leadership, peace and conflict studies. My vision is to briefly discuss religion’s relevance to civil society and how the junzi fits into the larger discussion on religion’s participation in civil society through their character, virtues, and transformational style of leadership. In the end, I wish to affirm Confucianism’s style of leadership and ethical standards can offer a more robust understanding of civil society, leadership theory, and add another model to peace and conflict studies.

German-British economist Ernest Friedrich Schumacher began his career as an exceptional but conventional economist, a devoted member of the British Labour Party. After a visit to Burma in 1955, his economic convictions began to change. No longer certain of the Labour Party program of nationalization and large-scale industrialization, Schumacher developed the concept of “intermediate technology,” something between a Western model of economic growth and an agrarian one. Perhaps best described as a small-scale socialist, he advocated “economics as if people mattered,” and criticized all social, economic, and environmental policies that did not prioritize the individual in community. Today, Schumacher is remembered primarily as an environmentalist, but his environmental work grew from his economic and moral understandings of human flourishing.

This article attempts to demonstrate that the use of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is retributive in praxis to address crimes against humanity in post-conflict societies without concurrent comprehensive political restorative processes, is ineffective. This article uses the Kenyan case after the 2007/8 post-election violence (PEV) to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of a retributive justice approach toward social reconstruction. The main weakness of the ICC as an institution using lies in its narrow focus on and use of retributive justice, as an essential transitional process. This article shows that such an approach, fails, though not absolutely, to efficiently offer a comprehensive process likely to promote possibilities for peace and reconciliation. Thus, the article suggests restorative justice as a necessary political strategy to foster peace and unity in Kenya.

Why do Conflicts occur? Why do they recur? Why do conflicts escalate and why do they become protracted? These questions have been variously posed by scholars of conflict and there is a rich body of theory that answers them. Although these questions arise for those who intervene in African conflicts and the different conflict theories have been brought to bear trying to contain them, conflicts still occur, escalate, recur and sometimes become protracted. This paper is an attempt to understand why this happens, especially despite third-party interventions. It starts by looking at traditional African third-party conflict interventions and identifies the restoration of relationships as the most important objective of such interventions. It compares contemporary conflict intervention strategies with traditional African approaches and observes that their objectives are remarkably different. It argues that traditional approaches are more responsive to the ideals of society than contemporary approaches which place greater premium on curbing conflict behaviour. While acknowledging the shortcomings of traditional conflict intervention strategies, it argues that there are lessons to be learnt from traditional strategies especially as it relates to promoting peace and maintaining relationships.

Throughout the Northern Irish Peace Process, there has been a conflict over how the state should support those affected by the conflict colloquially referred to as the Troubles. In this paper I use ethnographic research to argue that protest against the peace process is made meaningful through different temporal constructions of hope—what and how individual activists view as the future moral good. Hoping is a cultural and political practice with which individuals orient themselves to one another and to different political events, particularly contests over reconciliation and support payments. Understanding how the act and the ethics of hoping fit into different religious and secular narratives is a way of understanding the complex role of religious belief in giving meaning to political action. This approach also reorients peace activists towards the victim as a future-oriented agent, and not only a subject of past violence.

This paper assesses the approach to indefinite detention adopted by the Australian government, suggesting that it is a product of incremental reasoning favouring procedure over observing substantive rights. Specific emphasis is given to the category of detainees deemed to be refugees, but assessed as a pressing security threat. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has found such approaches in violation of international law. Disproportionate measures, it is argued, have been taken regarding such a class of refugees, in direct violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The trend towards such detention, however, is an international one, a security trend that defers legal judgment to that of the executive in what can be termed a form of governmentality in action. That trend received considerable impetus from the post-September 11, 2001 detention regime in Guantánamo Bay.

Oppression is a universal experience even though many agents and targets are oblivious of their roles. The unconsciousness of the oppressed and dominated individuals and some of those who are responsible for their dehumanizing experiences ensure that the phenomenon is unseen, hence unchallenged. Not only does the lack of awareness keep the oppressed submerged in this reality, but also prevents them from seeing how their response to oppression may help to perpetuate the system. Therefore, the first step in breaking the cycle of oppression in which people are entrapped is to walk with the oppressed to a point where their own enlightenment is possible. This walk which will bring the reality of oppression to the consciousness of the oppressed is what will also neutralize the phenomenon’s power of self-reproduction.