This thesis seeks to contribute to the understanding of conflict intervention in protracted violent conflicts by studying the activities of civil society actors in regard to the conflicts in what was Yugoslavia until 1991. A very broad understanding of ‘intervention’ is used for this purpose that includes all kinds of activities that relate to the conflicts. Based on a survey of activities in the period between 1990 and 2002, a framework for categorising and describing these interventions is applied according to basic functions in four ‘grand strategies’ of ‘peace-making’, ‘peace-keeping’, ‘peacebuilding’, and ‘information, support, protest and advocacy’, with a total list of about 230 instruments of conflict intervention identified. The study concludes that civil society actors played three different basic roles: They complemented the work of state actors, they were the avant-garde for approaches, strategies and methods that later became ‘mainstream’ in conflict intervention, and in some cases, they were able to control or correct actions by governments through advocacy or direct action. The development of instruments of civil conflict transformation received a massive boost through this engagement in the 1990s. The study supports the position taken recently by some researchers making comparative studies of cases of conflict intervention regarding the limited role played by dialogue and reconciliation work in regard to dealing with the overall conflicts: In spite of ‘reconciliation’ and inter-ethnic cooperation being at the core of the vast majority of all projects and programmes undertaken in the area, indicators of real impact regarding an overall positive change in society and prevention of future violence seem to be rather weak. The study further observes that there was a social movement developed relating to former Yugoslavia in many Western countries that in a hitherto unknown way combined traditional methods of protest and advocacy with concrete work in the field.

Thesis (M.A. in Peace Studies)--Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, 2004. / "The proposed curriculum for the African Peace Academy" (Chapter Six) consists of Section I - Africa, Section II -Religion, Section III - Peace Studies, and Section IV Economics and international relations. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-153).

Thesis (M.A. in Peace Studies)--Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, 2004. / "The proposed curriculum for the African Peace Academy" (Chapter Six) consists of Section I - Africa, Section II -Religion, Section III - Peace Studies, and Section IV Economics and international relations. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-153).

Thesis (M.A. in Peace Studies)--Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, 2004. / "The proposed curriculum for the African Peace Academy" (Chapter Six) consists of Section I - Africa, Section II -Religion, Section III - Peace Studies, and Section IV Economics and international relations. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-153).

This study is about peace building in Sierra Leone, during and after the civil war (1991-2002). The initial hypothesis was that the impact of externally driven peace building activities was reduced because of insufficient attention to local culture and priorities. This hypothesis was underpinned by a number of assumptions based on the author’s personal experience and the views of Sierra Leoneans met in the early post-war period.

Under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia, 1.7 million people died from starvation, overwork, torture, and murder. While five senior leaders are on trial for these crimes at the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, hundreds of lower level perpetrators live amongst their victims today. This thesis examines how rural Cambodians (including victims, perpetrators, and bystanders) are coexisting after the trauma of the Khmer Rouge years, and the decades of civil war before and after. In this qualitative research study, 134 semi-structured interviews were conducted with rural villagers, government officials, and peacebuilding practitioners. Cambodian culture is characterized by conflict avoidance, and reliance on family networks, hierarchy, and patronage. Buddhism is a strong cultural influence as well. These characteristics, as well as the lack of trust resulting from the Khmer Rouge years, provided important context for this analysis of Cambodian social recovery. Research on the processes of coexistence and reconciliation inform this study (Bloomfield 2006; Huyse 2003; Kriesberg 2001; Lederach 1997; Rigby 2001). However, few studies have been done that examine community reconciliation in Cambodia (Etcheson 2005b). This thesis examines the processes of reconciliation, including interfering and facilitating factors. Processes such as building relationships and trust, and developing empathy and compassion are explored. Cambodians’ views of apologies, revenge, forgiveness, and other key concepts are reviewed. Models of coexistence, acceptance, perpetrator coping strategies, and a victim decision-making tree are presented to assist in the analysis of the data. These models provide a theoretical framework for the understanding of the situation of coexistence and reconciliation in Cambodia. The thesis suggests that Cambodians are currently living in various stages of coexistence (surface, shallow, and moderate) and have not yet approached a condition of deep reconciliation. Practical applications of the findings are suggested.

Justice and reconciliation are both highly complex concepts that are often described as incompatible alternatives in the aftermath of violent conflicts, despite the fact that both are fundamental to peacebuilding in societies divided by the legacies of political violence, oppression and exclusion. This thesis examines the relationship between justice and reconciliation, pursued as essential ingredients of peacebuilding. After advancing an inclusive working conceptual framework in which seemingly competing conceptions regarding justice and reconciliation are reconceived to work compatibly for building peace, the thesis presents the results of an in-depth case study of Rwanda's post-genocide justice and reconciliation endeavour. The thesis focuses on Rwanda's justice and reconciliation efforts and their relationship to the ongoing challenge of reformulating Rwandans' social identities. A field research conducted for this study revealed that issues of victimhood, justice and reconciliation were highly contested among individuals and groups with varied experiences of the country's violent history. Resolving these conflicting narratives so that each Rwandan's narrative/identity is dissociated from the negation of the other's victimhood emerged as a paramount challenge in Rwanda's quest for justice and reconciliation. Rwanda's approach to justice and reconciliation can be seen as an innovative both/and approach that seeks to overcome dichotomous thinking by addressing various justice and reconciliation concerns in compatible ways. However, by limiting its efforts to the issues that arose from crimes committed under the former regimes, the justice and reconciliation endeavour of the Rwandan government fails to reconcile people's conflicting narratives of victimhood, which will be essential to transform the existing racialised and politicised ethnic identities of Rwandan people.

In this thesis, I investigate the different ways in which photography can be used to build peace in conflict situations. Although its role can be ambivalent, I primarily focus on its positive uses with the question: to what extent can photography promote peace rather than violence and conflict? My contention is that photography has the potential to contribute to building peace through several important roles in pre-conflict, post-conflict, and conflict situations: it can bear witness to truth, represent victims' suffering, encourage nonviolent resistance against violence, reconstruct painful memories, and re-imagine justice and reconciliation. To do this, I primarily focus on the May 18th Gwangju Democratic Uprising which happened between the 18th and 27th of May 1980 in the city of Gwangju, in the south-western region of South Korea. In the first chapter, I explore the relation between photography and peacebuilding, providing a brief history of 'war photography' particularly between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century. I focus on two movements in war photography - realism and surrealism. Then, I consider the role of war photography from a peacebuilding perspective, by focusing on the concept of 'social psychological distance' between photographs and audience. In the second chapter, I consider how a photograph can reveal truth in violent conflict situations, focusing on the concept of 'bearing witness'. In comparison with the concept of 'eye witnessing', I examine how photographs have contributed to bearing witness to violent events. In this fashion, I focus on the importance of journalists and their roles as bearing witness to truth. In the third chapter, I investigate how photography can represent a victim's suffering and promote empathy. For this, I re-examine compassion fatigue theory, drawing upon the work of Susan Sontag and Susan Moeller. I then explore the theme through analysis of social documentary photography in the mid-twentieth century in the United States. In the fourth chapter, I argue that photography has the potential play an active role in empowering people to overcome fear and resist violence nonviolently. This offers a balance to those who propose a compassion fatigue theory, arguing that repeated exposure to violent images can reduce moral sensibility. In other words, even though photography can produce cultural fatigue from overwhelming violent representations, it can also promote moral sensibility and social actions against violence. In the fifth chapter, I investigate the role of photography in the aftermath of violent conflict, mainly focusing on the relationship between remembering and painful history. Drawing on cultural memory theories such as those developed by Maurice Halbwachs and Aleida and Jan Assmann, I contend that social identities can be reconstructed through the process of remembering. I argue that photography can be a tool for remembering the painful history wisely, mainly focusing on reconstruction of identity and healing of cultural trauma (Hicks 2002; Volf 2006). I explore how photography contributes to the practice of remembering painful history rightly. In the final chapter, I focus on reconciliation and restorative justice as an alternative approach to building a just and peaceful society in the aftermath of a conflict such as the Gwangju Uprising. Because of the relational aspect of reconciliation and restorative justice, I argue, the approach can contribute to the development of the 'moral imagination' that overcomes the limits of the current juridical justice system. Reconciliation cannot be only the end of peacebuilding, but also a practical guideline for achieving both peace and justice.

Thesis (MA.(International relations))-University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Magister Legum - LLM (Criminal Justice and Procedure) / This is a study of Zimbabwe's National Peace and Reconciliation Commission Bill (hereafter NPRC Bill). The NPRC Bill seeks to bring the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (hereafter NPRC) of Zimbabwe into operation. The NPRC is a truth commission set to promote post-conflict justice, national peace and reconciliation in Zimbabwe. The study discusses the prospects of establishing an effective NPRC in Zimbabwe by examining the provisions of the NPRC Bill. The view of the paper is that, without proper guidance from a comprehensive law, the NPRC is bound to be a victim of its own failure.