Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This book addresses the fundamental question of how, in the face of unrelenting barbary and adversity, survivors of political violence and atrocity have sought to assert agency and contest power in Colombia, as they forge a path through which to bring an end to political violence, craft the effective means through which to reckon with the past, and reconstitute their political and moral communities. The book is in part about how war is fought, what its impact is, particularly on civilians, and the means that armed groups employ in order to achieve their ends; however, more emphatically, it is also about how those who survive atrocious violence narrate and make sense of war and attempt to construct peace, and, in so doing, transform political subjectivity and reconfigure relations of power. Drawing on unique interviews, the book builds on the case of Colombia to construct a new vision of victim-centred transitional justice, which is relevant for scholars and practitioners alike.
This chapter explores the role of the victims’ delegations as peacebuilders, looking specifically at the degree to which the delegations were able to effect relational change across three levels: (i) the individual level; (ii) the intragroup level; and (iii) the intergroup level (victims-perpetrators and perpetrators-perpetrators). The chapter argues that the delegations were, in part, an emancipatory project, while also signalling how the delegations precipitated episodes of depoliticization, retraumatization and revictimization. As such, the chapter further develops the argument that victim instrumentalization and empowerment may occur across a spectrum. It is contended that, alongside instrumentalization, politicization and, in some instances, revictimization and retraumatization, the delegations transformed the historically embedded perspectives held by the negotiating parties, leading to victim acknowledgement and the breakdown of the wall of perpetrator denial, while contributing to strategic decisions by the negotiating parties to de-escalate.
This chapter presents a within-case study of the mechanism behind the empirically most relevant assisted accountability approach in the ideal typical pathway case of the peacebuilding process in Sierra Leone. There, the peacebuilding approach included a strong, parallel focus on security and justice, with a comprehensive transitional justice component implemented alongside the presence of a multidimensional peacekeeping mission and extensive international support. The case study includes a qualitative study of process tracing to test the causal mechanism that links the assisted accountability approach to the outcome of sustaining peace. The data were gathered during two months of fieldwork in Sierra Leone and expert interviews conducted in Sierra Leone and New York. Ultimately, the chapter theoretically conceptualizes the assisted accountability mechanism and presents empirical evidence on the case-specific level to trace the implementation of the mechanism in postconflict Sierra Leone.
This final chapter brings the conceptual, methodological and empirical strands together and concludes the book. It explores what we can learn about configurations of peacebuilding institutions and their impact on successful peacebuilding beyond mere correlations. It then discusses the implications for the role and workings of the UN and other international organizations in the field of peacebuilding. Finally, it addresses promising avenues for future research and develops policy recommendations for a wider audience interested in peacebuilding and the establishment of sustaining peace.
This chapter makes a conceptual contribution to the peacebuilding debate by introducing the sustaining peace scale as an operational indicator for peacebuilding success. The scale permits the systematic evaluation of six levels of peace in societies emerging from armed conflicts. The chapter includes a discussion of the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with the study of peace in postconflict settings before summarizing conceptual work on peace in contemporary scholarship and within the context of the UN. In adopting a quality peace perspective, the chapter builds on previous debates, presents the sustaining peace scale as an empirical measure of a multidimensional peace concept, and discusses its conceptualization and empirical relevance for applied research. The sustaining peace scale forms the basis for answering the research questions of this book.
This chapter illustrates why a one-size-fits-all approach to peacebuilding is unfeasible and shows that peacebuilding success is often the result of mutually non-exclusive configurations of peacebuilding strategies designed to fit the respective postconflict case. AÂ QCA analysis of 54 peacebuilding episodes from 1989 to 2018 investigates how four institutional conditions (that is, international commitment, power sharing, SSR and TJ) interact in postconflict settings, facilitating or impeding peacebuilding success. The empirical analysis reveals no necessary institutions for the establishment of sustaining peace, but two equifinal patterns that are sufficient for peacebuilding success and are represented by a configurational model:Â (a) the assisted accountability approach, including the presence of international commitment and TJ; and (b)Â the spoils-of-peace approach, combining the presence of power sharing and security sector reform. The chapter concludes with a cluster analysis and discusses variations in sufficient patterns across conflict types and conflict regions.
This chapter outlines the book’s central research questions: how can we capture differences between qualitatively distinct levels of peace in postconflict settings, and what are the best peacebuilding approaches to ensure the establishment of high-quality, sustaining peace in societies emerging from armed conflict? To this end, the chapter introduces the research puzzle and main argument of the book, and discusses its theoretical, conceptual and methodological contributions to the advancement of peacebuilding studies. It reveals a gap in the field, describes an analysis of the effects of institutional configurations, and presents the core points of the research design: bridging the gap between individual peacebuilding factors by testing competing theoretical expectations in a single comparative analysis of successful peacebuilding patterns. Finally, it sketches the organization of the book.
This chapter presents a theoretical framework to explain why and under what conditions the establishment of peacebuilding institutions and state capacity can generate sustaining peace. Without an explicit theory of peacebuilding, scholarly and practical understandings of the term differ considerably in terms of the approaches used, the scope of activities and the timeframes. The chapter suggests an institutionalist understanding of peacebuilding in which interventions are understood as critical junctures, setting up political institutions that develop in a path-dependent manner and address commitment problems, and focuses on interacting institutional configurations that shape and reshape the peacebuilding process. Finally, it builds on the theoretical framework to select four institutional peacebuilding factors as causal conditions and considers their expected impact on the establishment of sustaining peace:Â international commitment; political power sharing; security sector reform; and transitional justice.
This book explores how to establish peace in societies recovering from large-scale, armed conflicts by introducing the sustaining peace scale as a continuous measure for peacebuilding success.
Drawing on an extensive data collection of peacebuilding episodes over almost three decades, the author analyses the impact of four peacebuilding practices - international commitment, power-sharing, security sector reform and transitional justice. Having established the framework, the author applies it to the peacebuilding processes in Sierra Leone and South Africa.
An important contribution to the literature on successful peacebuilding, this book will be essential reading for peacebuilding scholars and practitioners.
Revealing the (configurational) conditions through which peacebuilding interventions enable the establishment of sustaining peace requires a comparison of institutional settings in postconflict countries that have experienced successful and failed interventions. To this end, this chapter outlines the set-theoretic multi-method (SMMR) approach that enables the systematic assessment of interactions between institutional factors and highlights how this approach can provide insights for peacebuilding studies. At the cross-case level, this chapter introduce the set-theoretic method of QCA as a unique approach to the systematic analysis of successful peacebuilding and includes the argument that QCA is well suited to capture the complexity of peacebuilding interventions. As the second component of the SMMR design, process tracing is presented as the method for within-case analysis and enables a close look at the mechanisms between sufficient configurational conditions and outcomes in uniquely covered pathway cases. The chapter concludes with the calibration of the outcome set and the four institutional peacebuilding conditions.
