Conflict and Peace Building in Divided Societies: Responses to ethnic violence

271 Pages·2007·1.13 MB·English

by  Ant Oberschall

Conflict and Peace Building in
Divided Societies
This groundbreaking book provides an integrated account of ethnic, nationality
and sectarian conflicts in the contemporary world, the causes of civil war and
insurgencies. It explains how collective myths and threat propaganda promote
violence and block conciliation, shows the dilemmas of counterinsurgency in the
Occupied Territories, Balkan wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, highlights the shortcomings
of humanitarian intervention (Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur) and showcases peace
negotiations and their implementation. Oberschall analyzes:
· peace building through constitutional design
· power sharing governance
· disarming combatants, post-accord security and refugee return
· transitional justice (truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes tribunals)
· economic and social reconstruction in a multiethnic society
In addition to many examples from the last two decades, Oberschall provides a
comprehensive overview of the conflict and peace processes for Bosnia, Northern
Ireland, and Israel–Palestinians. He argues that insurgency creates contentious issues
over and above the original root causes of the conflict, that the internal divisions
within the adversaries trigger conflicts that jeopardize peace processes, and that
security and rebuilding a failed state are a precondition for lasting peace and a
democratic polity.
This book will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students,
researchers and academics interested in the fields of peace studies, war and conflict
studies, ethnic studies and political sociology.
Anthony Oberschall was educated at Harvard and earned a PhD in sociology at
Columbia in 1962. He has taught at UCLA, Yale and since 1980 at the University of
North Carolina, where he is now Emeritus Professor. He has been a Guggenheim
fellow and a New Century Scholar in the Fulbright program. He has taught and
researched in East and Central Africa, the People’s Republic of China, Germany,
France, Hungary, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland. Among his books are Social Conflict
and Social Movements (1973) and Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests, and
Identities(1993). Since the late 1980s, he has studied, lectured and written on conflict
and conflict management in divided societies.

Conflict and Peace Building
in Divided Societies
Responses to ethnic violence
Anthony Oberschall
First published 2007
by Routledge
2Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.
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© 2007 Anthony Oberschall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Acatalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-94485-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–41161–0 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–41160–2 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–41161–5 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–41160–8 (hbk)
Contents
Maps vii
Preface ix
1 The dynamics of ethnic conflict 1
2 Insurgency, terrorism, human rights, and the laws of war 41
3 Peace intervention 81
4 War and peace in Bosnia 100
5 The Israeli–Palestinian peace process 129
6 The peace process in Northern Ireland 157
7 Peace building 185
References 242
Index 257

Maps
1. Bosnia and Hercegovina 101
2. Occupied Territories 130

Preface
I started writing this book in my mind when Yugoslavia was breaking up
in 1991–2. I had studied and written about the by-and-large peaceful change
in Eastern Europe from communism to democracy, and I had also written
about the failed democracy movement in China in 1989. The different
courses and outcomes required an explanation. When peace implementation
got under way after Dayton, the travails of the peace process in the Balkans
and elsewhere focused my attention on peace building. Excellent books
and publications on international conflict management and ethnic conflicts
had been written and more were published every month. I learned a lot
reading them; nevertheless I believe the link between the conflict side and the
peace building side of the whole story had been downplayed, and that is how
I developed the “conflict and conciliation dynamic” which serves as my
unifying theme throughout.
I owe a debt to a 1998 grant from the National Science Foundation for
research on “Cooperation and conflict: encounters between Europeans and
non-Europeans” and from the United States Institute of Peace in 1998 to
study “Ethno-national conflict and its prevention.” I am also thankful for
having gotten a Fulbright fellowship in the New Century Scholars Program
in 2002–3 whose theme was “Addressing sectarian, ethnic, and cultural
conflicts.” I am a firm believer in field work for complementing other modes
of social science research. These grants enabled me to travel, observe,
and interview in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia in the summer of 1998 and in
Ireland, north and south, in the summer of 2003. I am very much indebted to
the academics, political leaders, media professionals, and just ordinary people
that I interviewed and consulted during these research trips. Unfortunately
plans for field work in the West Bank in association with Israeli and
Palestinian scholars fell through when the al-Aqsa intifada erupted in the
fall of 2000.
Ithank Professor Mari Fitzduff at INCORE at the University of Ulster in
Derry (now at Brandeis University), who kindly hosted me in Northern
Ireland, and Professor Boldizar Jaksic and Ivana Spasic at the Institute
for Philosophy and Social Theory, who hosted me in Belgrade and helped
arrange interviews. Professor Ivana Vuletic at my university was indis-
pensable for a content analysis of news stories on ethnic conflict in Bosnia.