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.

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.

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.

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.

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.