Peacebuilding

Scholars increasingly investigate how the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) is contested and negotiated in practice. Yet little knowledge exists on the politics African regional interventions provoke in the societies affected by such interventions. Based on an analysis of media reports from Burkina Faso and The Gambia, we show that regional interventions are indeed contested locally, irrespective of the means of intervention applied. Our analysis demonstrates how local elites use regional norms and policies in order to claim power and define what is going (wr)on(g). With this, we provide evidence for the (contested) local effects of APSA and for the relevance of media for researching such effects.

In the past twenty years, democratic participation through activism and civil disobedience has been increasingly expanded with the evolution of information and communication technology. It is assumed that the role of traditional media is not as influential as it once was due to the growing presence of self-made war journalists, hacktivists and whistleblowers, facilitated through the potential of the internet. The use of the latter as a tool from which information is disseminated rapidly, is fast influencing societal understanding and exposure to issues as they develop. Social media demonstrates precisely this phenomenon, in which people are able to accrue information and act upon it through mass communication and mobilisation. This article will therefore endeavor to analyse the evolution of media in conjunction with activism, from traditional media ethno-political conflict reporting, to today's whistleblowers and hacktivists that use the internet as their main platform. By factoring in these different aspects, this article is able to present a detailed account of the advantages and drawbacks of the latest developments in internet and technology, with special emphasis being placed on the role of online activism.

Regardless of its military might, the current availability of powerful, easily-concealed weapons makes it difficult for any nation to ensure peace at home or abroad. Moreover, there is growing concern that fear-based strategies of defense and peace-making cannot create or maintain lasting peace. Against this dismal backdrop, recent research documents the effectiveness of a new peace-creating technology which is profound in its concept, affordable, and easily implemented. Over forty presented or published studies on this technology, which was derived from ancient Vedic knowledge by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, confirm its ability to reduce conflict, promote international cooperation, reduce societal disorder, and improve quality of life. The research is so compelling that, for the first time in modern history, alternative, nonthreatening strategies for securing peace can be realistically proposed.

This article examines the emergence of counterinsurgency doctrine in Coalition interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While counterinsurgency is complimentary to the tenets forwarded by its classical military predecessors in several respects, the article shows that it is also more than a refashioning of conventional military practice. Counterinsurgency is intimately tied to institutional practices that shape global liberal governance. It can be traced to dominant trends in international humanitarian, development and peace interventionism since the end of the Cold War and it deepens the links between the social development of war-affected populations and the politics of international security. Rather than simply a shift in military practice, counterinsurgency is distinguished by its investment in civilian modes of warfare. Counterinsurgency retells the narrative of intervention as part of the evolution of political and economic liberalisation, marking a passage from interventionary force to post-interventionary governance. Modern counterinsurgency, it is concluded, exposes the widening indistinction between contemporary modes of peace and those of war in international relations.

Peacebuilding presents a formidable challenge to anthropology, because it “enframes” our contemporary world in particular ways. In our introduction to the special section on peacebuilding and anthropology we highlight the changing relationship between peace, conflict, culture and academic writing and how the three articles on Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and India-Pakistan address the changing relationships. The articles do not have the intention to present a coherent statement where anthropology “is” in relation to peace and conflict studies. Each of them engages with a different aspect of the discipline and broader question beyond ethnographic fieldwork.

In this article, I describe some of my research on caring, helping, active bystandership, and the origins of genocide and collective violence, as a background to interventions in real-world settings aimed to create positive change. They include working with teachers to create classrooms that promote caring and helping; training police to prevent or stop unnecessary harmful actions by fellow officers, and similarly students in schools to prevent harmful actions; promoting reconciliation, using trainings and workshops, and educational radio programs in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo; working to improve Dutch-Muslim relations in Amsterdam after violence; and a number of other projects. In these projects, information and participants' experiences combined to create "experiential understanding." Evaluation studies showed positive effects. These projects and their evaluation show that research-and theory-based interventions can be effective. An initial motivation for this work was my early childhood experience during the Holocaust in Hungary and receiving help from bystanders. Public Significance Statement This review of research, interventions, and applications in real-world settings shows that research on helping behavior and on the origins of great violence by groups can be applied to prevent violence, for example, by police or by students who would bully, and to help groups reconcile after great violence, for example, the genocide in Rwanda. It shows that knowledge gained in research can be used to make a difference in the world. Keywords: evolution of violence and of helping, passive and active bystanders, the roots of genocide, promoting reconciliation in Rwanda, preventing police violence and bullying by students I spent almost all of my professional life, starting in the mid-1960s, studying the roots of goodness (helping, caring about other people's welfare, moral courage, and active bystandership) and the roots of evil (the influences leading to genocide and mass killing, and, to a lesser extent, violent conflict and terrorism). I also engaged in activities both to increase caring, helping, and active bystandership, and to prevent harm and violence and promote reconciliation after great violence. This article is primarily about the applications of research and theory, mainly my own but also others', to real-world settings. It originates from a talk I gave at the National Summit on Violence in November 2016 at the American Psychological Association offices in Washington, D.C. The editor of this journal was present and invited me to write an article describing the "interventions" my associates and I have conducted in varied settings, my experiences along the way, and the lessons I learned, in the hope that it would help others doing similar work. He suggested that I could do this in an autobiographical manner. I begin by considering the roots in my early experience of my lifelong commitment to such work. Next, I briefly describe some of my research and theory, which guided the applications. The applications range from working with teachers to create class-Editor's Note. Continue the conversation by submitting your comments and questions about this article/book review to PeacePsychology.org/ peaceconflict. (The Editor of PeacePsychology.org reserves the right to exclude material that fails to contribute to constructive discussion.) ERVIN STAUB holds a PhD from Stanford, taught and Harvard and is Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the PhD program in the Psychology of Peace and Violence, Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is former President of the International Society for Political Psychology and of the Peace Psychology Division of APA. He has studied the origins of and ways to increase caring, helping, moral courage, active bystandership and altruism born of suffering, and the roots of, or societal, cultural and psychological influences leading to genocide, mass killing and intractable violent conflict and ways to prevent these. In addition to studying these he worked in many real world settings, for example to promote reconciliation after a genocide in Rwanda, improve Dutch Muslim relations in the Netherlands after violence there, training police in active bystandership to prevent fellow officers from doing unnecessary harm, and creating classrooms that promote caring. CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING THIS ARTICLE should be addressed to Ervin Staub,

Informe de la Fundación Ideas para la Paz.

"Desde su constitución como centro de pensamiento independiente en 1999, la Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP)
ha tenido como uno de sus principales objetivos contribuir
de manera eficaz a la comprensión de todos los actores armados y escenarios relacionados con el conflicto armado
en Colombia. Teniendo en cuenta lo anterior, la FIP elaboró
el presente informe que busca a través de fuentes estadísticas
y cualitativas, reconstruir buena parte de la evolución
que ha tenido el conflicto armado en los últimos 25 años.

Los hace a través de seis tesis que explican sus dinámicas
más recientes, haciendo énfasis en aquellas regiones
donde el Gobierno Nacional reconoce que el conflicto sigue
activo y tiene mayor impacto. En este informe también se
actualiza el diagnóstico de impacto humanitario que tienen
estas dinámicas del conflicto sobre la población civil, y se
incluyen una serie de reflexiones acerca de los logros y retos
que enfrentan las Fuerzas Militares en la actualidad.
Este informe y el trabajo investigativo que lo respalda, fue
realizado gracias al apoyo del Programa de Reintegración
con Enfoque Comunitario que implementa la Organización
Internacional para las Migraciones (OIM), con el respaldo
económico de la Agencia de Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo
Internacional (USAID). Los contenidos son responsabilidad
de la Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP) y no reflejan
necesariamente las opiniones de USAID o de OIM". (Tomado del informe)

Transitional justice is a major concept in promoting peace and reconciliation between conflicting parties. It is usually associated with formal judicial processes such as criminal justice, rule-of law reform and paying reparations. This chapter focuses on another transitional justice method, a more informal one: memory work. There is a growing realization of the major impact on the way in which the history of a conflict is viewed by the members of parties involved on their psychological and behavioral reactions. Addressing that history properly can promote their well being, conflict resolution and reconciliation between the parties. There are many ways of addressing the relevant history, for example, through truth and reconciliation committees, the rewriting of history textbooks, and commemoration projects. This chapter focuses on another way: the role of the autobiographical memory, that of the people who experienced the conflict directly, as it is manifested in their memoirs, newspaper articles and interviews with scholars. To this end the chapter uses a case study approach, regarding the causes for the main historical event of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the 1948 Palestinian exodus. It explores for the first time the way in which Israeli-Jewish 1948 war veterans presented these causes between 1949 and 2004. The question posed was: did their autobiographical memory present a Zionist narrative (willing flight of the Palestinians) or a critical/post-Zionist narrative (willing flight combined with expulsion)? This exploration is based on an analysis of all published war veterans' memoirs and newspaper articles, as well as interviews with scholars, in the 56 year research period. During this study, interviews were also conducted with 1948 war veterans. Following the description of the empirical findings regarding the Israeli-Jewish autobiographical memory of the exodus, these findings are used to theoretically conceptualize various phenomena. For example, what determines the way in which direct-experience people describe their experiences during a conflict, how these people influence directly and indirectly the collective memory of their society of a given conflict, and the way in which they influence the dynamics of

Conflict Analysis is an important aspect of peace-building and the nitty-gritty involved which can simply be defined as a dynamic process to measure or access an ongoing conflict be it local, national or global. One of the importance of Good Conflict analysis is that it helps in sorting through, prioritize and understand those relationships and just as importantly how the context (or the operating environment) influences the nature of the conflict, but also the importance of focusing on context (the course of the conflicts) and not just on a given conflict.

The paper will focus on Imagine, one of the most famous songs written by John Lennon used to communicate to people the support for an anti-war campaign movement. The writer will discuss the song lyrics and try to show how Lennon perfectly expressed his point of view against the continuous wars that happened during 1960s and 1970s.

This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The question under examination is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. This paper uses a representative national survey specifically designed for this research project and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2012. It analyzes the roles of regionalism, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, age, and sex in attitudes toward the Red Army, Soviet partisans, the German Army (Wehrmacht), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war, as well as toward the wartime leaders of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the UPA. The analysis of the survey data shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Soviet Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups.

Ce travail est né d’un constat général sur l’actualité de la résolution des conflits armés en Afrique et tout singulièrement en RCA. Si autrefois, l’option militaire était privilégiée comme solution de règlement du conflit, la perspective aujourd’hui s’inscrit dans la négociation et plus généralement la résolution pacifique. Dans cette dynamique de résolution des conflits, les accords de paix constituent un moyen utile pour éviter toute solution militaire. C’est donc à juste titre que nous avons décidé de travailler sur un thème aussi expressif qu’actuel.. L’intérêt que nous avons porté à ce sujet n’était pas de voir l’aspect militaire de la résolution des conflits mais plutôt ces instruments nouveaux que constituent les accords dont l’objectif est de mettre fin à ces nombreux conflits. Ceci nous a permis de comprendre qu’au bout de toute logique militaire se trouvait la nécessité de négocier et de parvenir à une négociation de paix, d’où l’intérêt de notre sujet et de la problématique que nous avons pu dégager dans le cadre de nos recherches.

The European Union (EU) has closely correlated different aspects of the peace process in Bosnia with progress towards European accession. The ‘power of attraction’ of EU membership would presumably induce the Bosnian authorities to accept the adaptation costs of political and economic transformation. However, the Europeanisation approach has not produced the expected results. The track record of the EU’s policies towards Bosnia represents a paradigmatic case of what would happen if almost nothing works as efficiently as in the case of the countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. The article investigates the causes of EU policy failure in Bosnia and claims that the EU has not effectively responded to three challenges: 1) adjust the process to the needs of an ethnically divided post-war state; 2) preserve the credibility of accession conditionality, and 3) convey the proper messages on how to comply with EU rules. Therefore, the article argues for a more cohesive and consistent EU approach towards Bosnia.

People abused by angry discipline as children, may tend to abuse or overly punish other people or themselves for perceived wrongs in their adult life. In some individuals, aggressive personality traits may be genetically inherited. The aggressive personality may feel weakened by having guidelines or boundaries for anger. Anger is a normal human emotion, and these guidelines can help express anger in a healthy way.

Emerging with increased intensity since the 1990s, peace-building and reconstruction of post-conflict and war-torn societies have become central to today's international relations and assistance agendas. When we are talking about reconstruction of collapsed states, we have to keep in mind two models: an external model which rests on building institutions which promote stability through checking the exercise of power, and an internal model where domestic actors produce change and which hinges on re-establishing power.

Silahlı çatışmaların ekonomi üzerindeki negatif etkisi ve barış, güvenlik ve ekonomik gelişme arasındaki pozitif ve doğrudan ilişki çatışma çözümü alanının artan oranda ilgi duyduğu konulardan biri haline geldi. Alanda artan farkındalıkla beraber iş dünyasının ve özel sektörün demokrasi inşasındaki rolünü konu eden çalışmaların sayısı da bu gelişmeye bağlı olarak sevindirici biçimde artış göstermekte. Okumakta olduğunuz bu rapor da konuya, Kuzey İrlanda örneği özelinde ve ülkedeki iş dünyasının barışın ekonomik getirilerini dile getirmede, çatışmanın barış ile çözülmesi için lobi faaliyeti yürütmede ve barışın ekonomik boyutunu ele alan siyasi tartışmaları güçlendirmede oynadığı role ve çalışmalara odaklanmaktadır. Raporda, Kuzey İrlanda iş dünyasının kullandığı ve barışın sağlanmasına katkı sunan metot, yaklaşım ve etkileşim yöntemleri ayrıntılarıyla ele alınmaktadır. Ülkede barış anlaşmasının sağlanmasının ardından, anlaşma sonrası süreçte yabancı yatırımın barışın getirdiği ekonomik kazanımların yaygınlaştırılmasında ve bu sayede barışı teşvik etmede oynadığı pozitif rol de ayrıca ele alınmaktadır. Kuzey İrlanda deneyimi, barışın sağlanmasına yönelik kolektif kurumsal eylemler repertuarı bakımından, dünyanın farklı yerlerinde çatışmalardan etkilenen diğer ülkeler için ufuk açıcı bir uygulama veya uyarlama örneği olmayı sürdürmektedir.

This course is designed to develop:
(1) An understanding of the potential risks, dangers, challenges and constraints involved in working in war and post-war contexts;
(2) The ability to devise resourceful, ethical, and appropriate responses to them; and
(3) Knowledge of qualitative field research fundamentals.
      “Qualitative Research in Communities Affected by War” is intended for students who are thinking of working in war or post-war situations, or on war-related issues. While it will of course address qualitative research issues and methods, the course is also aimed at developing a deeper understanding of community dynamics in war and post-war contexts and providing practical instruction about how to effectively and ethically gather useful information about such communities.
      As a result, the course is designed not only for researchers but for others who aim to somehow assist or engage with war-affected communities in the future.

SNMPE: "Es gibt keine Strategie, um illegalen Bergbau zu formalisieren oder auszurotten"
- Der IWF schlägt eine Erhöhung der Bergbausteuer vor.
- Der Botschafter der physisch lebendigen Erde
weiss um eine andere Lösung.

04.12.2021 06:11 Uhr Die National Society of Mining, Oil and Energy (SNMPE) warnte diese Woche vor "einer unkontrollierten Ausweitung des informellen Bergbaus" in Puno und 13 weiteren Regionen. Demnach hätte der jüngste Zusammenbruch einer Abraummine in den Händen kleiner Bergbaukooperativen Verbindungen zu illegalen Mineralabbauorganisationen. Angesichts der Tatsachen forderte die Gewerkschaft am 26. November in Ananea, Puno, eine Untersuchung durch die Regulierungsbehörde Osinergmin und die Environmental Assessment and Enforcement Agency (OEFA) des Umweltministeriums. "Die Ursachen und Verantwortlichkeiten für den Einsturz der Infrastruktur, der durch das Überlaufen der Abraumhalden entstanden ist, müssen identifiziert werden ", sagte die Gewerkschaft und betonte, dass es sich nicht um einen Einzelfall handele, da im November 2019 ein weiterer Abraumdamm in demselben Gebiet eingestürzt sei an zwei Genossenschaften Bergbau.

Die Lösung und Sichtweise vom Botschafter der physisch lebendigen Erde bitte Im Text und Link lesen.

Most of the critical peace literature has put 'a local turn' as an important aspect of a paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding, both in academic and practice-oriented terms. Although most of the made criticism is valid, it is still being disputed by Western academics with their epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. The voice of researchers who live in post-conflict or conflict-affected societies is still very much restricted by structural, institutional or personal constraints. Consequently, by drawing mostly from the experience of local researchers in the Balkans, the paper analyses the main causes for the limited impact of local researchers in the liberal peace debates, and proposes several steps that could lead to their stronger involvement in this discussion. We are doing something we don't understand fully, and the best we can do is admit we don't understand it, and that we also don't have time to understand it. 1

Securitizing Youth offers new insights on young people’s engagement in a wide range of contexts related to the peace and security field. It presents empirical findings on the challenges and opportunities faced by young women and men in their efforts to build more peaceful, inclusive, and environmentally secure societies. The chapters included in this edited volume examine the diversity and complexity of young people’s engagement for peace and security in different countries across the globe and in different types and phases of conflict and violence, including both conflict-affected and relatively peaceful societies. Chapter contributors, young peacebuilders, and seasoned scholars and practitioners alike propose ways to support youth’s agency and facilitate their meaningful participation in decision-making. The chapters are organized around five broad thematic issues that correspond to the 5 Pillars of Action identified by UN Security Council Resolution 2250. Lessons learned are intended to inform the global youth, peace, and security agenda so that it better responds to on-the-ground realities, hence promoting more sustainable and inclusive approaches to long-lasting peace.

The Oskar Schindler Humanities Foundation established The Irving and Jeanne Glovin Award in 2003, to foster research into the meaning and underlying principles for “good human conduct.”  The Foundation is interested in stimulating scholarly work that defines “good human conduct” with which all persons could agree, to explore its sources, and develop pragmatic educational strategies and ways of teaching children, to show by action, respect and acceptance of others by peoples of the world regardless of circumstances or background. This essay was written with these objectives in mind. Though this submission did not win it was ranked in the top three - not for research, rather for the pragmatic approach,  ideas, and suggestions put forth. Ultimately this piece is an impassioned commentary and draft outline of a proposal for teaching upcoming generations "good human conduct" in the public school system.

Despite the fact that it is not the only country facing critical social problems related to inequalities, Colombia is also the only one in Latin America facing an internal armed conflict that has lasted over 50 years. Extremely diversified violence has reached astonishing levels of barbarity in different sectors of urban society but, above all, in rural areas. However, a new horizon of hope is being felt in the country with the beginning of peace talks in 2012 in Havana (Cuba). While receiving broad national and international support, these peace talks, while monopolized by Fuerzas Armadas evolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) are not addressing the root causes of violence. In this regard, the over-politicizing of the concept of peace within Colombia has tackled the issue of national reconciliation, by reducing it to dichotomizing discourses.

All education regulated by nation-states is, in one sense, education for (some kind of) peace.  In the liberal “social contract” tradition, the purpose of any government is to protect citizens from violence, as a prerequisite for their individual pursuit of well-being (2006).  Collectively, citizens (defense, security) serve as justification for —and (through taxation) funders of— military spending and deployment (Franklin, 2006b).  Governments have had a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in order to serve as security guarantors.  Further, governments since the 19th century have had virtual monopoly on “legitimate education” (Gellner, cited in Tawil & Harley, 2004), used to create and maintain a sense of shared national identity and social cohesion (peaceful relations) among their citizens. Thus citizenship education has always had ramifications for peace and conflict, both domestic and international. This chapter does not ask whether citizenship education should include peace and conflict education.  Rather, it examines how implicit and explicit citizenship education in schools already does teach about peace and conflict, and what kinds of citizenship education about peace and conflict would be most fruitful for developing and sustaining inclusively pluralistic, democratic peace.

El gobierno colombiano y el grupo guerrillero de las FARC—EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo), después de más medio siglo de conflicto en el país, llegaron a un acuerdo de paz en 2016. El Acuerdo de Paz de La Habana, desde una perspectiva de paz positiva, trae más que un posible fin a la violencia a Colombia: aborda los desafíos a la protección social profundamente arraigados legados por el conflicto, además de una refundación del Estado colombiano. Hay una laguna teórica y empírica, todavía, sobre ¿por qué y cómo pueden los mecanismos de justicia transicional colaborar con la promoción de medidas de protección social y abordar sus desafíos en ambientes de construcción de paz? En este artículo argumentamos que la justicia de transición impulsada por el Acuerdo es una herramienta fundamental para hacer frente a los desafíos a la protección social en Colombia —sean ellos históricos u oriundos de la pandemia de COVID-19. Proponemos un nuevo ángulo a las...

Este artículo analiza cómo el patrimonio cultural inmaterial puede contribuir a los procesos de construcción de paz durante periodos posteriores a la firma de acuerdos de paz. Asimismo pretende enriquecer el debate alrededor del proceso de paz que vive actualmente Colombia. La investigación utiliza una metodología cualitativa con técnicas de recolección de información como observación, entrevistas a expertos, comunicaciones con personas relevantes y análisis documental. Argumentamos que el uso del patrimonio cultural permite un mayor involucramiento de la población en la construcción de paz y apropiación del proceso. Puede ayudar a reconstruir el tejido social afectado por la guerra y reducir la violencia cultural y estructural presente en la sociedad posconflicto. Más específicamente, puede promover la justicia transicional, la reintegración social de los excombatientes y la transformación pacífica de los conflictos. A pesar de este potencial, el patrimonio cultural también puede p...

The United Nations (UN) peacebuilding strategy often establishes a nexus between security, democracy and development. This strategy states that sustainable peace could be achieved whenever institutional reforms towards democratization and economic development take place. In this paper, we intend to identify whether the strengthening of state institutions in the aforementioned sectors contributes to tackling the root causes of intrastate warfare. Methodologically, this paper consists of a case study of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (2003-2018). To evaluate the effectiveness of the peacebuilding policies deployed in Liberia, we have gathered empirical data to identify advantages and flaws in the UN approach. Our findings show that although policies regarding the nexus between security, democracy and development have addressed some crucial post-conflict issues, reforms in these areas were unsuccessful to fragment local elites, avoid uneven economic development and ensure horizontal welfare for Liberians.

This article examines the positionality of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge through fieldwork in qualitative research in Northern Uganda. While scholarly literature has evolved on the positionality and experiences of researchers from the Global North in (post)conflict environments, little is known about the positionality and experiences of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge. This article is based on interviews and focus groups with research assistants and respondents in Northern Uganda. Using a phenomenological approach, this article analyzes the positionality and experiences of these research associates and respondents during fieldwork. Three themes emerged from these interviews and are explored in this article: power, fatigue, and safety. This article emphasizes that researchers need to be reflexive in their practices and highlights the need to reexamine how researchers are trained in qualitative methods before going into the field. This article is further critical of the behavior of researchers and how research agendas impact local stakeholders during and after fieldwork.

The Nordic countries have long been renowned for their contribution to international peace and security. This contribution – occasionally viewed by both Nordic and non-Nordic policy-makers and academics as a particular model for facilitating peace and development in international affairs – is based on a combination of active contributions to peaceful conflict resolution, a high level of development aid and a continuous commitment to strengthening international society. However, recently Scandinavians have been making headlines for reasons that seem to contrast with their well-established brand as humane internationalist peacemakers. This article identifies the characteristics of the Nordic model for international peace and security and discusses how and why it has changed.

The Syrian civil war has seen the weaponization of its land and property rights system by the primary combatant groups in the country. The government is the most robust in its use of the tenure system to locate, target, destroy, confiscate, cleanse, and gain revenue by way of the institutions and attributes comprising the system. Based on fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, this article describes seven ways the Syrian government is currently using the land and property rights system in its military-on-civilian engagements. While the objective of such use is presumably to permanently prevail over opposition civilian constituencies, the article describes how this actually creates evidence usable for effective restitution of lands and properties subsequent to the war. Introduction The ongoing civil war in Syria has emerged as a laboratory of new weapons used by the various sides in the conflict. While a number of these are purely kinetic-involving both crude and innovative forms of firepower, executions, troop movements and strategies-others take advantage of society based structures and institutions which facilitate targeting specific constituencies within the civilian population and then become attached to kinetic objectives. Statutory land and property rights systems are particularly vulnerable to being used in this way, with significant effect and lasting repercussions. While the Syrian government is not the first to use aspects of land and property rights systems in the pursuit of military objectives, it is the most current, egregious and sophisticated. This paper describes how the statutory land and property rights system has become an important weapon in the Syrian conflict with a number of uses, but with the ultimate counterinsur-gency strategic objective of spatially and permanently prevailing over the insurgency and its civilian constituencies. Permanently ridding certain landscapes of opposition supporters and replacing these with pro-regime inhabitants is just as important to the overall objective of 'prevailing' as is military victory over insurgent combatants for the Syrian government.

International peacebuilding is usually discussed as liberal peacebuilding. Indeed, the implementation of liberal-democratic norms and institutions constitutes a core element of mainstream peacebuilding as practiced since 1990. Yet international activities aiming at democracy promotion go beyond the specific field of peacebuilding. Since 1990, they have become standard elements of the foreign and development policies of established democracies and international organizations. In looking at contemporary challenges to democracy promotion, the chapter suggests that the crisis discussed in this volume is tied to a crisis of the very normative premises and conceptual underpinnings of the overall liberal template that guides both peacebuilding and democracy promotion.

¿Se puede hablar de una política de paz? En el caso de Colombia, el objetivo del gobierno Santos de negociar con la guerrilla de las farc y llegar a un acuerdo de paz ha sido, de hecho, el principal objetivo desde que asumió el poder. Pero ¿qué tan pública fue esa política, ya sea que se entienda política pública como "todo lo que el gobierno hace o deja de hacer" (Dye, 1992) o de forma más elaborada como "proceso integrador de decisiones, acciones, inacciones, acuerdos e instrumentos, adelantado por autoridades públicas con la participación eventual de los particulares, y encaminado a mitigar, solucionar o prevenir una situación definida como problemática" (velásquez, 2009)?

Fortunately, there is a science-based approach that can protect Pakistan from both internal and external threats. It is appropriately termed, Invincible Defence Technology (IDT), because it assures invincibility, peace and even economic progress, to the nation and the military that employ it.

Its methods have been proven and adopted as part of the training of America's future commanders at Norwich University, a nationally respected and oldest military academy in the USA. IDT is further validated by 23 peer-reviewed studies carried out in both developed and developing nations. Its coherence-creating effect has also been documented on a global scale in a study published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. When large assemblies of civilian IDT experts gathered during the years 1983 - 1985, international conflict decreased 32%, terrorism-related casualties decreased 72%, and overall violence was reduced in nations without intrusion by other governments.

The message of peace and nonviolence was believed in the early church until the claim of Constantine's vision was endorsed by Eusebius and Lactantius. Scriptures and quotes from early church writers are reviewed, and thought questions challenge the reader.