Continuing our work on the issue of betrayal in peacebuilding Wilhem Verwoerd, Alistair Little and Brandon Hamber have published a new article in the Peacebuilding journal entitled “Beyond intragroup betrayal during intergroup relational peacebuilding”.
The article is open access and can be downloaded here.
This article addresses a neglected human cost of relational peacebuilding, identified in an earlier article on ‘peace as betrayal’. The focus here is how relational peacebuilders can respond to painful accusations of betrayal by family-type group members evoked by working with the ‘other side’. Continuing to draw on the reflections of experienced peace practitioners from South Africa, the Israel-Palestine region and the conflict in and about Northern Ireland, a contrasting distinction is made between two routes: a ‘clarification’ route that explains why working with ‘them’ is not a betrayal of ‘us’ vs a ‘counter-critique’ response that attempts to turn the traitor tables on the accusers. An evaluative discussion of the counter-critique route explores the pitfalls of political abuse, avoidance of shared responsibility and underestimating ‘thin’ relations (Margalit), as well as the complementary potential of the clarification and the counter-critique routes beyond peace as betrayal.
Through the prism of Northern Ireland, this article explores the function of existing and proposed archives within societies emerging from conflict, and highlights their potential in adding complexity to understanding conflict and challenging dominant narratives. The article outlines how, despite progress since the Northern Ireland peace accord in 1998, efforts to deal with the past and human rights violations have been piecemeal and politically contested. In the absence of a comprehensive approach to the past, testimony gathering, initiated ‘unofficially’ at a community level, has provided opportunities for individuals’ experiences of the conflict to be documented and acknowledged. The recent Stormont House Agreement (2014) seeks to establish an Oral History Archive as a central repository for individuals to ‘share experiences and narratives related to the Troubles’. The article discusses the challenges in developing this ‘official’ archive, and the problem of reconciling competing historical narratives of the past. This is contrasted against the growth in bottom-up ‘storytelling’ or testimony work. The article argues for supplementing the official process with wider testimony gathering processes directed by and located within community contexts. It is argued that the deliberate juxtaposition of contrasting horizontal or inter-community narratives held by different local parties may allow for the emergence of a more complex and inclusive narrative of the past, rather than attempts to impose a shared vertical narrative, which is subject to either further contestation or uncomfortable compromise.
This is an important publication as it outlines key tenants of how the issue of could be dealt with in post-conflict settings, a very under-explored area. The article outlines three fissures evident in the embryonic scholarship, that is the privileging of direct violence and its limited focus, the continuities and discontinuities in militarised violence into peace time, and the tensions between new (less violent) masculinities and wider inclusive social change. The article argues for the importance of making visible the tensions between different masculinities and how masculinities are deeply entangled with systems of power and post-conflict social, political and economic outcomes. An analysis of masculine power within and between the structures aimed at building the peace in societies moving out of violence is considered essential. The article argues for an analysis that moves beyond a preoccupation with preventing violent masculinities from manifesting through the actions of individuals to considering how hidden masculine cultures operate within a variety of hierarchies and social spaces.