This thesis contributes towards the knowledge of post conflict crafts of Kashmir and the role women play in this sector. It proposes crafts to be a culturally relevant activity which could generate income for people living in Kashmir. It analyses the impact of the conflict on the crafts of Kashmir from the perspective of the craftspeople. The research is based on fieldwork conducted in Srinagar, Kashmir (2003-2006). Here craftsmen’s groups were studied and a craftswomen’s organisation – Zanana Dastakari was used as a case study. Fieldwork techniques allowed the voices of crafts people to be heard, allowing this study to be conducted from their perspective. Supporting literature was used to place Kashmir within the larger context of crafts, gender and conflict. The research found the crafts of Kashmir to have changed in response to the conflict, the most significant shift being of women joining the crafts sector as stakeholders. Women have selected the area of crafts due to their subjective preferences, which often stem from their identity as Muslim women. This work proposes links between poverty, unemployment and conflict and suggests that culture can play a role in economic development. In Kashmir economic development and reconstruction could be boosted through promotion of this sector. The implications of this research in light of other research indicates a need for deeper understanding of identities and needs of women in conflict zones and the evolution of coping mechanisms used by them to generate sustainable incomes.

This study analyzes how civic engagement and collaborative governance can be used to build peace in post-conflict societies. A case study approach is used to examine the presence of civic engagement as a precursor to collaborative governance in the reconstruction of segregated areas in post-conflict Ambon, Indonesia. The study evaluates the effective ways that people were engaged in the multiple processes of reconstruction and assesses the readiness of Ambon to apply collaborative governance in current affairs. It finds that collaborative governance can be applied to public policy processes in segregated societies in post-conflict and can promote inter-society engagement. This study suggests that governments and NGOs in post-conflict areas could use a collaborative governance approach to sustain peace in post-conflict areas. The conclusions recognize that integrating collaborative governance into peace building programs is a crucial element of the peace building process in post-conflict areas, creating a greater likelihood for sustainable peace.

Examining the phenomenon of post-conflict reconstruction, the research challenges the appropriateness of the uniform application of general policies and practices to any particular environment. As a context- and conflict-dependant practice, a post-conflict reconstruction that aims at achieving lasting peace and sustainable development should address specific needs through relevant mechanisms. This is especially relevant for post-ethnic-conflict cases. The thesis argues that post-conflict reconstruction after an ethnic conflict should address as a matter of priority the problems related to the recovery or construction of societal micro-frameworks with respect to the macro-unit in focus. Based on the explored concepts of social capital, a model outlining its specific fragmentation after an ethnic conflict is elaborated and the research discusses the mechanisms that have the potential to contribute to the achievement of planned and desired reconstruction outcomes and levels of success. To test the theory against empirical findings, the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina is examined, as it provides good examples for the negative impact of ethnic conflict on macro and micro socio-political levels and for the discrepancies between expected and achieved results. The reconstruction practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina is considered in the context of policies and programmes designed and implemented by representatives of the international and local community, with a focus on the efforts directed towards social capital rebuilding.

This dissertation explores the relationship between peacebuilding, theory and praxis, and women. It examines the impact that peacebuilding has on women and the ways in which women participate in peacebuilding, both during conflicts and in the period of transformation that follows. In this dissertation I argue that women are profoundly affected by conflict and are crucial to peacebuilding and post-conflict transformation. This dissertation seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of how peacebuilding and post-conflict transformation impacts on women. The dissertation includes a study of Bougainville. The ten year civil war which began in 1989 ended in 1998 with a formal ceasefire and was followed by the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001. It was the role that women played throughout the conflict which has been widely cited in the literature that is of most interest to me. Bougainvillean women have been credited as being the motivating force behind the peace process during the war, in the lead up to the ceasefire and peace agreement, and an integral part of the post- conflict transformation of Bougainville. Many suggest that one explanation for this is because Bougainville is mostly a matrilineal society. Although some literature suggests matrilineality is restricted to lineage and land, this dissertation contends that matrilineality in Bougainville gave women substantive power and authority over most aspects of society. With some exceptions, the literature on peacebuilding is relatively recent, galvanized by Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace (1992). A more historical body of literature postulates an enduring relationship between women and peace. These two bodies of literature provide the context for this dissertation. The literature that directly frames the argument of this dissertation is the feminist literature on women and peacebuilding. This literature proposes that the conflict and its aftermath are profoundly gendered phenomena. Birgitte Sorensen’s 1998 report, Women and Post-conflict Reconstruction: Issues and Sources, categorises peacebuilding into the areas of political, economic and social and critically examines the impacts of each of these areas of peacebuilding from the perspective of women. This report provides an excellent framework for this study. I use Sorensen’s model but have extended it to include a fourth category on postconflict justice to explore how issues related to women and justice are addressed. I do this because there are a number of issues related to women and post-conflict justice that need to be explored in greater detail, such as women’s access to land and gendered violence. This dissertation examines how each area of peacebuilding impacts on women, and how women and men participate in these areas of peacebuilding. This approach provides the structure of the dissertation. This dissertation concurs with the proposition that conflict and its aftermath are profoundly gendered. Even in the matrilineal society of Bougainville where women enjoy relatively high status, conflict has its disempowering effects on women. Peacebuilding adds new dimensions to the power of women and their disempowerment. In relation to political peacebuilding, there is an uneasy hybrid system of authority in Bougainville as the people of Bougainville attempt to retain some of their traditions in the newly constructed Western models of governance. The evidence is clear that women are under-represented in the introduced Western institutions. Over time, these institutions accumulate more of the power and authority. Within the economy, women are, as ever, the producers. In the past women’s ownership and control of land gave them control over the labour of men (in some parts of Bougainville), but the ending of the conflict has opened up new spaces for men to control land. Nihilistic spaces have emerged where once there was fighting. The shape of the new Bougainvillean economy is by no means clear, but there are disturbing signs that women will not be accorded their due as producers within society. Much of the feminist literature on peacebuilding points to the fact that women’s work in peacebuilding is unseen in mending the torn social fabric of post-conflict society. This dissertation confirms that hypothesis. This is where the women in Bougainville have managed to retain their traditional matrilineal strength as carers and healers of the social body. However they face new problems in relation to land and in relation to the escalation of domestic violence. They also face ongoing problems of how to heal and remedy the trauma of what was simultaneously a struggle for independence and a civil war. Matrilineality has protected Bougainvillean women from some of the traumas of war. The children of women raped during the conflict are welcomed into their matrilineal clan and women are able to exercise considerable authority within their communities. Nonetheless, it is a profoundly disturbing finding of this dissertation that peacebuilding in Bougainville may itself be setting boundaries around the power and authority of women in matrilineal Bougainville. Bougainvillean women may yet need to contend with men for their rightful place in the new society.

Violent conflicts related to tribal-political differences have characterised the Kenyan society since the declaration of multi-party democracy in 1991. The 2007/8 post-election violence (PEV) in particular resulted in the displacement of many Kenyans. Scattering of families saw some children losing months or years of schooling with others permanently excluded from education, while the participation and achievement of those arriving in school was characterised by complex needs and experiences. This PhD study explored pupil and teacher perceptions of the learning and development needs of conflict-affected children in one primary school in Kenya. In particular, this study sought to understand how school leadership practice was developed and leadership roles negotiated, in order to meet pupils’ needs and develop an inclusive ethos. The study addressed the connection between leadership, inclusion and post-conflict education. A single intrinsic case study with aspects of ethnography was undertaken adopting an interpretive approach. Sixteen pupils (9–12 year-olds) shared their views of their learning and development needs through two activities. The headteacher, deputy, senior teacher and six teachers were interviewed (n=9) and asked to reflect on the challenges they experienced in addressing pupils’ needs. Their perceptions of the roles for school leadership were sought, and observations of their everyday practices were conducted in classrooms, assemblies and school ceremonies. Data from these interviews, observations, texts-on-walls, and pupils’ activities were thematically analysed. The participants identified the following as pupils’ learning and development needs: access to, acceptance in, and predictability of their new school; ‘peer-connectedness’, social development, and social inclusion. Children emerged as active agents in their own education, combating adversity through supportive peer relationships. Eurocentric and African perspectives on leadership, and Davies’ (2004) work on education and post-conflict reconstruction were particularly useful in making-sense of how leadership unfolded in practice. Three areas of educational reconstruction in particular were identified as significantly underpinning leadership roles: i) reconstruction of leadership structures allowed shared leadership which facilitated the meeting of pupils’ needs at different levels; ii) reconstruction of relationships targeted repairing children’s emotional, social and moral distortion, and iii) reconstruction of learning cultures encouraged collaborative learning initiatives that improved academic standards. The study found that the connection between school leadership and inclusion in post-conflict schools can be understood along three themes. The first is ‘post-conflict conflict’. I have used this term to reflect that the cessation of overt tribal violence, coupled with movement of pupils into this new settlement ushered in a new phase of conflict for pupils, teachers, schools and their communities. Schooling was characterised by poverty, fragmented/mobile families, distorted social values associated with post-election atrocities, alongside, structural barriers linked to government and sponsor-related needs. Second, ‘connectedness’: while societal fragmentation produced divisions, fear and suspicion of ‘others’, reversing the situation required school leadership to foster social connectedness. Finally, ‘Africanised school leadership’: fostering connectedness required enlisting communal responsibility and mutuality in undertaking emerging roles, thus, employing aspects of local indigenous heritage. The study contributes to knowledge in the emerging field of educational leadership in post-conflict settings (Clarke and O’Donoghue, 2013) whilst addressing the less investigated connection between teachers, leadership and inclusive education (Edmund and Macmillan, 2010), particularly in post-conflict circumstances. The research is timely in informing leadership programs that the government of Kenya is advancing e.g. in decentralising decision-making (MOE, 2012b/c) and, re-alignment to its obligations in the IDP Protocol of the Great Lakes Pact (Kigozi, 2014). Recommendations are made for policy, practice and further research. The conclusion to my study argues for a reconceptualisation of school leadership practice beyond single-leader paradigms, whilst revisiting prioritisation of roles for school leadership, especially, towards fostering inclusiveness in the conflict-prone Kenyan society.

This mini-dissertation relates to the post-conflict period in the DRC, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, juxtaposing the rights-based and interest-based approaches to conflict management and resolution. The study is premised on the lack of significant collaboration between the two approaches, notwithstanding the already existing collaboration. The rights-based approach posits that there exist some crimes of international dimension that should not be left unprosecuted for whatever reason. The approach sees the compliance with international norms on the respect of human rights as more important than coming to a final resolution of conflict. This paradigm therefore postulates that transgressors of international norms cannot take part in peace agreements and must be held individually responsible for the atrocities they have committed. The approach considers justice as a prerequisite to peace. The interest-based approach frowns at the idea of laying blame on persons as being responsible for committing horrendous breaches and rather seeks to be neutral and not blaming any party. The approach encourages more dialogue and cooperation between the two parties which could culminate in a settled agreement. The approach gives more room to inclusiveness, participation and conflict resolution. Peace here is accepted to be a conditio sine qua non to justice and the resolution of conflict thereafter. As a result of this juxtaposition of approaches, proponents of the two approaches have been perpetually suspicious of each other’s approach. This impasse has therefore retarded collaboration in the two paradigms to a sufficient degree. This study therefore argues for a third stand, which is the synergy of the approaches to collaborate to a degree which will enhance sustainability in peace agreements to guarantee durable and long lasting peace in the DRC, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. This third stand depicts that integrating the approaches, insights and knowledge from one approach strengthen and benefit the other. Conflict resolvers will understand how rights denial have the potential of igniting conflict, and human rights actors will enhance their negotiation skills in conflict resolution especially in areas where the access to rebel occupied zones and even to political prisoners is difficult. Finally, the study has also depicted how traditional African methods and concepts like Gacaca and Ubuntu can be enhanced within the broad usage of the two paradigms and not as competitive paradigms. Gacaca is a traditional mechanism in Rwanda whose primordial aim is the settlement and reconciliation of the victim with his perpetrators. Ubuntu seeks to reiterate the connectivity existing between Africans. Conflicts will not exist if we all love one another due to our connectivity. ‘We’ is given more consideration than ‘I’. This is the understanding from the perspective of Ubuntu. Copyright / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Centre for Human Rights / unrestricted

During the last decades, international organisations have worked hard to implement a gender awareness in their peace- and development programs. Many organizations, however, fail to include an awareness of masculinity construction, and gender has become synonymous with women. This is despite the fact that throughout history, key actors in armed conflicts have been men. Understanding how masculinity is constructed in relation to armed-conflicts can therefore be beneficial to achieve a lasting peace. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to examine how masculinity norms are expressed among Namibians after the Namibian war of independence, and how these norms have developed during the post-war era. By conducting a mixed-method of content and discourse analysis, this study investigates how the hegemonic masculinity is constructed by the citizens of Namibia through the “letters to the editor”-section in the national newspaper The Namibian. All letters published during 1991, 1992, 2002 and 2003 were analysed to achieve an understanding of how the masculinity norms had developed. The study found that the hegemonic masculinity in the earlier years consisted of a strong and honourable man, with a high education and the possibility to independently take care of his family. The hegemonic masculinity had in the later years developed into a more caring and compassionate man, who supported his working wife.  The study also found that some aspects of the hegemonic masculinity had remained the same, such as heterosexuality and monogamy. The study encourages further research on the development of masculinity norms in a post-conflict setting, and how these norms may hinder or encourage a lasting peace.

Somalia has recently come out of a two decade long civil war and is currently in a post-war and rebuilding phase. The national health system, largely crippled during years of conflict, is faced with a significant maternal mortality ratio and the debilitating effects of a high fertility rate. To combat these issues, the new Somali government is working toward creating a strong national health system that addresses some of these key indicators. With a lack of human resources in healthcare and the need for better reproductive health services, the need to invest in educating a new generation of health service professionals is evident. To address this gap in education, many educational institutions with health science faculties have opened in the last decade but the quality and accuracy of their curricula has yet to be examined. My thesis addresses this gap in knowledge. Through a multi-methods study that included reviewing curricula and curricular materials, conducting key informant interviews, and facilitating focus group discussions, I was able to learn about the quality and comprehensiveness of reproductive health topics in health service professionals‟ education and training. Religion, culture, logistical issues, and lack of oversight shape the way reproductive health is taught to health students. This study provides an important foundation to help inform key stakeholders working to improve the Somali health system.

This dissertation examines the factors that shape political participation and perceptions about political choice during and after conflict. Societies that experience civil war, and particularly ethnic civil war, are vulnerable to the “conflict trap,” meaning that they are likely to experience second or third wars based on tensions exacerbated by conflict. Existing literature on group mobilization in post-conflict societies and related scholarship predicts that factors like ethnic identity, income, and education best explain participation in political violence and likelihood of recurrence of civil war. However, countries often defy these predictors, and gaps remain in our understanding of how citizens participate in politics during conflict. This dissertation therefore seeks to answer the question: What explains citizens’ choices about political participation as they experience the turmoil conflict and post-conflict periods? To answer this question, this study draws upon the case of Burundi, a country that has hovered between post-conflict and conflict statuses since the conclusion of its recent civil war. I conduct qualitative analysis of 113 in-depth interviews collected across four provinces in Burundi, examining the variety of choices made in relation to political participation both during and after the war. I find that citizens’ choices about political participation are fluid, and heavily contingent upon their interpersonal connections, with specific contributions in three main areas. First, rebel and political groups’ identities hinge upon the values associated with narratives they use to garner legitimacy, more so than the division itself (be it political, ethnic, or otherwise). Second, interactions that take place between generations and within key social networks heavily influence patterns of political participation. These interactions explain the wide array of relationships to politics observed within subgroups (like youth and women), and provide a better understanding of how they take action. Last, in the post-conflict era, non-state actors influence the potential for conflict, simultaneously creating space for wider political participation and challenging state actors still interested in maintaining legitimacy. These findings challenge currently weak predictors of cyclical violence and the assumed mechanisms driving them, highlighting the prominence of social ties and roles that shape mobilization and political choice.

It has long been argued in scholarly research that powerful third parties make excellent third parties due to their superior economic and military capabilities, yet surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to superpower mediation and bias, and how it affects post-conflict levels of bias. While it is expected that powerful mediators, with their leverage and ability to enforce peace agreements with military force will be biased mediators, cases of mediation by superpowers shows this is often not the case. By exploring the phenomenon of post-conflict levels of violence and how it is correlated with great power mediation bias, this study focuses on specific cases of superpower mediation, while allowing for the idiosyncracies of each conflict to be integrated. Guided by previous empirircal findings, this study argues that levels of post-conflict violence will be lower in countries mediated by biased superpowers due to the leverage, influence and credibility they bring to the mediation process, and ability to 'deliver their side' in negotiations. This study will employ a structured focused comparison to provide a systemic comparison to test the hypothesis on three selected conflicts, the 2001/02 India-Pakistan standoff, the Dayton Agreement and Oslo peace process.