Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This paper argues that post conflict communities need capacity to effectively deal with violent conflicts. This study therefore examines avenues through which sport can be used as a catalyst for mediation programmes in Zimbabwe and South Africa, to address sustainable community healing. This will capacitate communities with the skills to mediate and resolve their own conflicts, thereby contributing to knowledge and changing the paradigm of post-conflict community healing. Grounded in the structural functionalist theory and John Paul Lederach’s Multilevel Leadership pyramid, this study was carried out in Mfuleni, Western Cape and Highfields, Harare, where mediation training for sport participants, community coaches, sports men and women were carried out. It was assessed at all the stages using the qualitative research methodology. This study discovered many benefits derived from the sport and mediation training. However, successful implementation of sport and mediation training in post-conflict communities can face challenges around language, different ways of interpreting terms and related issues by stakeholders; the extreme dominance of religion; superstition and use of magic in sport; lack of acceptance in communities on issues around age and gender, owing to patriarchy. It also noted that the school system is replete with loopholes that threaten the security of learners. Also, the school system is caught in the net of propagating patriarchal values, albeit in subtle ways. As such, the need to take all these into consideration cannot be overemphasised

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Aid coordination in the health sector is known to be challenging in general, but even more in post-conflict settings, due to the multiplicity of actors of development, to the sense of emergency in providing health services, combined with the so-called weak institutional capacities‘ at local level, resulting from the conflict. This study sought to analyze broad determinants of aid coordination using the example of HRH policies in Burundi, during the post-conflict period. Burundi is a country in Central Africa, which experienced cyclic ethnic conflicts since its independence in 1962, the last conflict being the longest (1993-2006).Determinants of coordination were analyzed using the policy-analysis triangle (Gilson et Walt), using data from documents and semi-structured interviews, conducted in 2009 and in 2011, at national, provincial and facility-levels. A conceptual framework, combining organizational and social sciences theories, was devised in order to assess the organizational power of MoH, the one supposed to act as coordinator in the health sector. Findings showed a lack of coordination due to post-conflict specific context, to competition over scarce resources between both donor and recipient organizations and to an insufficiently incentivized and complex coordination process in practical. Most importantly, this research demonstrated the crucial role of post-conflict habitus and mistrust in the behavior of MoH and their influence on organizational power, and, in turn on their capacity to coordinate and exert an appropriate leadership. These findings, together with the growing body of literature on organizational sociology and collective trust, point at the crucial need to rebuild some of the wounded collective trust and organizational leadership in Burundi and in other fragile states.

The Master thesis connects a concept of sustainable development and post-conflict reconstruction and uses this connection to analyze post-conflict reconstruction after Kosovo war in 1998 - 1999. The situation is analyzed in four dimensions - economic, social, political and environmental and the thesis examines how much importance is given to the different dimensions. The dimensions are analyzed according to different stages of post-conflict reconstruction. The conclusion of the analysis is that the environmental dimension was given less importance than the others and the development was not sustainable.

Liberal Statebuilding in post-conflict societies is a very complex, intricate and dynamic task that is often based on liberal assumptions. Critiques argue that local contributions to define democracy and its norms, such as accountability, tend to be limited since local experiences are often perceived by the aid and statebuilding community to predate liberal requirements. Democratic norms are consequently often based on external international legitimacy and intentions rather than on domestic acceptance. In order to explore this further, this thesis critically examines the development of one democratic norm, accountability, in Afghanistan by using field data and applying Sikkink and Finnemore’s Norm Life Cycle to three accountability characteristics. These map out the norm’s legitimacy, its methods and relationship between Afghan citizens and government in order to understand the manifestation of accountability. The objective of the thesis is to assess whether accountability in Afghanistan was developed as intended by liberal statebuilding between 2001 and 2013. Empirical findings show that accountability did not manifest per the liberal democratic definition since the social and political realities that heavily impact norm development were not incorporated in the statebuilding approach. Combining theoretical and conceptual analysis, the research contributes to the Critical Peace Studies and Good Enough Governance literature and concludes that the liberal statebuilding methodology introduced accountability in a de-contextualised way that deprived it from norm contestation and local legitimacy. The thesis argues that this had both positive and negative effects. Accountability was introduced to a context that could benefit from its existence, but its introduction was done in an inconsistent manner that weakened its domestic conceptualisation by ignoring the link between social action and political power. Moreover the international community’s role in promoting accountability in Afghanistan both advanced and hampered the development of the liberal norm. Donors were able to raise accountability’s profile in the democratisation process but did so from an inaccessible and unaccountable political space that further removed Afghan citizens from policymaking and politics. The thesis’ application of a norm development lens to statebuilding provides a more in-depth and nuanced analysis to democratisation and one that, I hope, is original. It uses this alternative methodology to engage both with academic debate, and with policy development and implementation. The suggested approach allows for a better insight into the mergence between liberal concepts and local contexts as it not only confirms the existence of hybridity or mergence, but it also elaborates on its quality and consequences. It further proposes a more emancipatory statebuilding process that moves beyond a top-down vs. bottom-up perspective to a more enfranchised and integrated approach.

A major weakness of the literature on the regulation of freedom of expression within the field of political science is the assumption of peaceful, liberal democratic conditions. My project seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the legitimate regulation of speech by analyzing disciplinary approaches to freedom of expression through the lens of countries recovering from intractable conflict. I ask: How appropriate are current understandings of freedom of expression to the regulation of speech in post-conflict environments? Relying on insights from the field of social psychology and the case of post-genocide Rwanda, I argue that greater restrictions on freedom of expression could be legitimate in countries recovering from intractable conflict. However, rights derogations must take place within limits so as not to become a tool of authoritarian rule.

This theses evaluates the postconflict reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the perspective of institutional economy. The purpose od this theses is to answer the question whether it is possible to achieve the desired change in the reconstructed society by transplanting the institutional model. First chapter focuses on the studying of institutions, their importance for further development of the society and the possibilities of the institutional changes. Second chapter deals with the major moments in the development in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Third chapter analyzes the success of postconflict reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina and identifies the obstacles preventing the consociacional democracy from being succesfully transferred, provided that such model was supposed to be guarantee of the peaceful living in the multiethnical society in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This research explores the tensions between non-formal land access, violence and urban land policy in the post-conflict city of Juba in Southern Sudan. It departs from the conventional notion of rights to land based on property rights to a broader concept of ‘access’ to investigate the means, processes and relations within society, or ‘mechanisms’, by which individuals attempt to gain and maintain access to non-formal settlement land, how this is controlled and the connections to violence. Moving beyond current dualist frameworks used to understand informality, this research aims to unpack the formal and non-formal institutions in the city whose interplay results in unequal opportunities for individuals to access urban land and how violence is both a mechanism and outcome of this. Using a mixed methods methodology, the research was carried out in Juba and three of its non-formal settlements that have emerged at different times during the city’s approximately ninety-year history. It used mainly in-depth interviews, group discussions, participant observation, structured settlement surveys and semi-structured key informant interviews. As the ‘new’ capital of a multi-ethnic region that has experienced decades of civil war, Juba provides fertile ground to explore these issues. Firstly, by tracing the evolution of the region’s political economy the research shows how, rather than being a new phenomenon, exploitation by government and violence have been integral features of urban land management in the region. Secondly, by considering Juba’s development it shows how violence underpins contemporary settlement patterns in the post-conflict period. Thirdly, by providing case studies of three non-formal settlements it details the evolvement from a sense of community to more segregated practices where land access is becoming highly ethnicised, reflecting broader tensions in the region. Finally, it shows how both ethnic tensions and unclear legislation are being instrumentalised by a web of powerful actors who, whether through coercion, deception or violence, are undermining urban planning in the post-conflict city for their own benefit, and hence the ability of non-formal inhabitants to access land. The research concludes that partly due to the formative nature of institutions controlling urban land access, violence has not ended in the post-conflict period but remains integral. Nevertheless, whilst approaches to non-formal settlements may be seen as a consequence of the persistence of dysfunctional institutions, it also relates to the post-conflict political economy that is emerging in Southern Sudan and the extent to which urban land access is facilitated by connections with the urban political or military elite. As a result, for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, returnees, combatants and ex-combatants the ‘peace dividend’ is compromised. In an urban environment hostile to their presence, they have no choice but to settle in non-formal settlements that, rather than being a solution to their shelter needs, leave them exposed to exploitation by a range of powerful actors.

The thesis focuses on the post-conflict reconstruction of a small Balkan state, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the emphasis on a wide-range mandate assigned by the Dayton Peace Accords to the regional security organization OSCE. The second part of the thesis takes a closer look at the main causes of the current political, economic and social crisis hindering the development of the country. Although Bosnia is a unitary country, it is strongly decentralized in most of its public life as well as political and social sectors, including the political parties, media or education system.

Creative ambiguity as a negotiation strategy is used often in peace agreements and refers to when ambiguities are used in agreements to serve as a positive motivation to get over obstacles. While it has many positive impacts, the use of creative ambiguity also often times shifts the burden of the negotiation phase to the implementations phase, and thus can result into agreements that are not implemented as well as plummeting the relations between the parties affected. This thesis aims to understand how the use of creative ambiguity in the Brussels Agreement between Kosovo and Serbia had an impact on the heightened conflict between the countries. This thesis is a single instrumental case study that illustrates the issue of creative ambiguity through the case of the Brussels Agreement. Through analysing interferences from material mainly collected from both countries’ government websites, this study conducted that the use of creative ambiguity had a harmful impact not only on the relations between Kosovo and Serbia, but also on the implementation of the agreement.

Many studies find support that natural disaster events and post-conflict episodes increase the risk of organized violence. However, few are found to investigate if post-conflict countries become more violent in the aftermath of natural disasters. By combining research on post-conflict violence, natural disasters, and non-state violence, it is argued in this study that disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and pandemics strain the capacities of all governments, and in post-conflict countries, the weakened capacities of governments can cause public security gaps. These power vacuums, as a result of natural disasters, can incentivize non-state groups to expand and compete for control, and consequently causes the severity of violence to increase. This argument is estimated on country-year data consisting of 64 post-conflict countries between 1989‒2015. A statistically significant correlation between natural disasters and the increased severity of non-state violence is found when testing the argument using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and logistic regression, control variables, and different dependent variables. However, due to limiting factors in the statistical models, the results are deemed too ambivalent to fully support the hypothesis.