This thesis provides insights into approaches to regional peacebuilding with reference to the Mano Union River region of West Africa, comprising Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea. Using the case of the interrelated conflicts in these countries, particularly of regional fighters that fought in two or more countries, it investigates the constraints of conventional peacebuilding theory and practice in addressing regional conflict. Drawing largely on a constructivist International Relations approach, it argues that state-centred perspectives of conflict and peacebuilding, undertaken by institutions made rigid by ritualised practice, preclude an understanding of cross-border conflicts as localised conflicts, within the framing of a micro-region, and also block their effective engagement with the narratives articulated by combatants about their motivations for participating in cross-border conflict. Fieldwork was largely undertaken in Liberia, with the analysis supported by in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with regional combatants of Sierra Leonean, Liberian and Ivoirian descent, based in Liberia, as well as an institutional ethnography of United Nations peace operations, drawing on participant-observation, interviews and documentary analysis. The thesis demonstrates that while economic motivations feature prominently in regional combatants' motivations, they also subscribe to other motives, in part mediated by socially constructed regional identities. These motives, however, receive limited or misguided attention from peacebuilding institutions, resulting in responses that are, in turn, limited in scope and effectiveness. A key lesson is the importance of understanding the opportunities and challenges arising from localised yet transnational imperatives that translate into violent cross-border movements in marginal border areas, to ensure adequate responses and sustain peace in the region in the long term.

Contemporary peacebuilding debates centre on questions of effectiveness, relevance, and sustainability, broadly contrasting a ‘liberal peace' model and more ‘critical' perspectives. The critical peacebuilding literature calls for a transformative approach addressing inequalities and systemic violence underpinning conflict, promoting ‘local' engagement, and responding to ‘everyday' priorities. Education systems play central roles in reproducing or challenging relations of power, privilege, and inequality associated with violent conflict, and represent key sites of ‘local' and ‘everyday' engagement. However, the critical literature has paid limited attention to education's potential, and political, peacebuilding role. In this thesis, I explore the importance of education in peacebuilding and argue that peacebuilding scholarship should seriously engage with education. Using a case study approach and a critical cultural political economy framework, I explore links between education, inequality, and peacebuilding in South Sudan, through analysis of donor and government policies and interviews with 217 education and peacebuilding actors. I suggest that education policies and practices reproduce political, economic, and cultural inequalities and violence and undermine peacebuilding aims in three broad ways. First, education resource and service distribution reproduces, justifies, and institutionalises geographic and intergroup disparities and grievances associated with ‘real' and perceived inequalities. Second, ‘local' participation strategies based on ‘decentralised' governance reproduce patterns of political exclusion, exploitation, and mistrust between ‘local' communities and authorities. Third, formal education practices and informal narratives concerning identity and difference, in relation to inequality, conflict, and peace, reproduce colonial forms of oppression and violence. These findings demonstrate the complexity of education's peacebuilding role, expanding critical discussions concerning inequalities, the ‘local', and the ‘everyday' and providing insight into specific sociopolitical processes through which these can be addressed, both analytically and ‘practically'.

Since the Oslo Accords, the two-state solution has dominated, and frustrated, the official search for peace in Israel/Palestine. In parallel to it, an alternative struggle of resistance — centered upon the single state idea as a more liberating pathway towards justice to the conflict — has re-emerged against the hegemony of Zionism and the demise of a viable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. This thesis inquires into the nature of this phenomenon as a movement of resistance and investigates its potential to become a counterhegemonic force against the processes of Zionism as embedded within the peace process since Oslo. To this end, it reconstructs the re-emergence of the single state solution both intellectually and organizationally. This reconstructive analysis is undertaken in two interlinked ways. On the one hand, this thesis analyzes and evaluates the single state alternative from within its own self-understandings, strategies and maps to power. In doing so, it centers the political practices of the situated resistances of the oppressed themselves. On the other hand, it mobilises a classical Gramscian theoretical approach—one that re-centers the processes of counterhegemony, and Gramsci's radical embrace of the transformative power of the human being—through the writings of Edward Said. This theoretical lens enables the analysis of the counterhegemonic potential of this alternative through an evaluation of the extent to which it meets the more stringent demands of becoming a Gramscian-Saidian counterhegemonic force of liberation. Hence, this thesis represents both an empirical contribution to knowledge, and a theoretically informed analysis of the nature of the single state alternative. The thesis finds that the single state alternative can be seen as a Gramscian-Saidian movement of critical pedagogy aimed at creating a reconstructive moment within the conflict. It argues that it has laid much of the groundwork required to become an expansive counterhegemonic force. However, this potential has yet to be seized through a unified, officially led vehicle openly endorsing a single state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and has several obstacles left to overcome in its process of becoming an established political force.

The African Union (AU) was set up in the year 2000 by the Constitutive Act of the African Union (Constitutive Act). Part of AU’s objectives for its creation includes; the promotion of peace, security and stability on the continent as well as the protection and promotion of human and peoples’ rights in accordance with the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR).2 As part of fulfilling this objective, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) was established3 with a wide human rights protective mandate which allows it to determine cases and disputes concerning the interpretation and application of the ACHPR and other international human rights instruments.4 / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2010. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

The Committee of 100 (C100) (1960 – 68) were a British anti-nuclear protest group who campaigned for mass non-violent direct action (NVDA) in an effort to force the government to revise its defence policy. The formation of C100 created tensions with the already-established Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whose leaders objected to C100's commitment to civil disobedience. The two anti-nuclear campaigns had some membership overlap but always remained separate. Until now, any investigation of C100 has been incorporated within wider studies of CND or has been quantitative in method. This thesis therefore addresses a historical gap by employing a life history approach to examine C100 as a distinct group. Drawing upon oral history interviews with twenty-four C100 members the resulting analysis reveals new aspects of C100's innovative structure and method, and identifies the particular nature of those who joined the campaign. A new image of first wave anti-nuclear activists emerges when focusing on C100 protestors. The respondents reveal motivations for campaign engagement that contrast with those of earlier representations of CND supporters. They were inspired by a common interest in global civil rights concerning human health and survival and a need to actively challenge rather than merely petition the authorities. Significantly, many C100 members came from left-wing, progressive or anarchist backgrounds. They were an erudite group with regard for knowledge, despite many putting conventional education on hold to fully engage in the campaign. This thesis examines C100's libertarian nature, and the extent to which its membership managed to be anti-hierarchical in structure, ethos and policy. It explores tensions within C100 concerning limits and definitions of NVDA that changed over time and came to radicalise the campaign. A biographical approach also reveals significant factors around C100 prison experience concerning issues of class and gender. This thesis serves to situate C100 for the first time in its own right on the socio-political map, both historically and globally.