"Sections of the book engage in critical reflection on what peacebuilding effectiveness is and who gets to decide, provide practical examples and case studies of the successes and failures of assessing peacebuilding work, and support innovative strategies and tools to move the field forward. Chapter
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s reflect a variety of perspectives on peacebuilding effectiveness and methods—quantitative, qualitative, and participatory—to evaluate peacebuilding efforts, with particular attention to approaches that center those local to the peacebuilding process. Practitioners and policymakers alike will find useful arguments and approaches for evaluating peacebuilding activities and making the case for funding such efforts." (Publisher description)
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"Examining the crucial role of crisis communication and education on a global scale, this research-based compendium covers a broad range of key topics, such as democratizing education, promoting peace through complexity science, understanding how factionalism threatens democracy, encouraging citizen
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participation, and more. Throughout the text, the authors highlight the need for equity, compassion, critical thinking, and active engagement to create a sustainable future based on democratic values. Designed to enhance the knowledge base of crisis communication related to crises impacting education, peace, and democracy, Communication and Education: explores different strategies and practices for fostering democracy in education, such as the IDEALS framework for creating positive school cultures; discusses emotional geographies in schools and their impact on democratic school climate and teacher burnout; emphasizes empathic communication and participatory skills among teachers; offers practical strategies and examples of harnessing technology for peace and democracy; provides real-world case studies illustrating the transformative power of education, music, diverse perspectives, and open communication channels; examines the ecological interdependence of effective communication, education, democracy and peace." (Publisher description)
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"El presente libro pretende arrojar luz sobre la importancia de la educación política a partir de hallazgos por parte de una academia crítica y comprometida con la democracia y la paz y desarrollar recomendaciones prácticas para el diseño de la educación política en Colombia. También pretend
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e facilitar un intercambio de experiencias entre el mundo académico y la práctica de Colombia y Alemania y, de esta manera, posibilitar procesos de aprendizaje mutuo y entre disciplinas, así como entre países. De esta manera, el presente libro busca contribuir al objetivo del Instituto Colombo-Alemán para la Paz de fortalecer intercambios académicos en temas relevantes para la construcción de paz en Colombia y más allá de Colombia." (Prefacio)
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"El volumen se divide en dos grandes ejes temáticos, en el apartado “Comunicación” aborda procesos de Ecuador, Colombia y Brasil. En el caso ecuatoriano se analiza la cobertura informativa de las protestas que se realizaron en 2019 en Quito y la presencia de indígenas en las manifestaciones p
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ara reflexionar respecto al rol de los medios y evidenciar tendencias en la cobertura informativa de alinearse con un discurso oficial que suele presentar las manifestaciones sociales con un enfoque negativo; en Colombia se analizan los aportes de radios comunitarias en la transmisión de voces de paz y resistencia en el Departamento del Huila, el discurso de la prensa respecto a los actores del conflicto en los medios de comunicación y la manera en que representan a la guerrilla y grupos paramilitares y se analiza la memoria colectiva construida a través de producciones televisivas sobre el conflicto armado; desde Brasil nos encontramos un análisis de las jerarquías del espacio social construido por la narrativa periodística en el desencuentro con la alteridad y la representación de la migración construida predominantemente por el narrador sobre la condición laboral en su precariedad y supuesta amenaza. Para el apartado “Memoria y Paz” se integran trabajos sobre experiencias en cinco países: Ecuador, México, Nicaragua, Brasil y Estados Unidos. De Ecuador se revisa la percepción de violencias y cultura de paz en los jóvenes y las identidades de los jóvenes migrantes a través de sus historias de vida; de México se aborda la educación para la paz mediante la experiencia de talleres de arte con adolescentes, la violencia en la frontera Norte y procesos locales de construcción de paz en Ciudad Juárez y la justicia restaurativa en sus alcances y limitaciones con el cuestionamiento sobre sus posibilidades de aportar a procesos de paz; de Nicaragua se retoman experiencias de mujeres en la construcción de paz y memoria ante el conflicto armado; y desde Brasil se reflexiona sobre la violencia estructural con relación a la condición laboral impuesta por un un modelo económico y social excluyente, que suma desigualdades, radicaliza las tensiones sociales y que lleva a las personas a la ansiedad, estrés y depresión. De este modo,la construcción de paz a lo largo de América Latina, los procesos de memoria y la forma de comunicar las experiencias de lucha y resistencias locales son los ejes que articulan la selección de textos." (Presentación, página 12-13)
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"Colombia's 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla sought to end fifty years of war, and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. A renegotiated deal began to be implemented, a
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lbeit haunted by a legitimacy deficit. Gwen Burnyeat, a political anthropologist and peace practitioner, joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, which created a "peace pedagogy" strategy, a world first in peace processes, to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Her multi-scale ethnography, based on unprecedented access to government officials, reveals the challenges they experienced in representing the government to skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. Through peace pedagogy, officials embodied the government and became the relay between state and citizens--effectively, the face of the Santos government. Burnyeat argues that Santos' failure to mobilize society was the fatal flaw in the peace process. As in the UK's Brexit referendum and the US Trump election, rational explanations were powerless against disinformation because political views are shaped by emotions, culture, history, and identity. The Face of Peace offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to "post-truth" politics." (Publisher description)
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"While the importance of visualization of war, conflict, and violence has gathered great momentum in disciplines such as International Relations (IR), far less has been said about the visualization of peace in IR, history, and even in Peace and Conflict Studies. As Maria Elena Diez Jorge and Francis
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co Muñoz Muñoz point out, "[v]iolence has received the attention, while peace and its entire semantic sphere have been left out of the spotlight". It is this relative blind spot that this special issue wants to address as it aims to reflect on the politics, policy, and pedagogy of visualizing peace. Among other questions, it will reflect on how peace is visualized in cultural artifacts and what these representations of peace (and their absence) do politically. In other words, what is presented in the picture of peace and what is left out? What consequences can this have for the construction of politics? In addition, the special issue considers how visual artifacts can contribute to real-world peace after violent conflict. How can visualization in film, photography, or documentaries help build peace and contribute to conflict resolution, reconciliation, transitional justice, and peace pedagogy? If we accept the argument of the cultural turn and believe in the co-constitution of culture and politics and in the idea that cultural artifacts such as movies take part in the construction of a dichotomous understanding of self and other, thereby contributing to the legitimation of violence and conflict, then this may also work the other way around: Cultural artifacts like movies can play an important role in peace processes." (Page 5)
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"Visual metaphors stand at the border between text and image, as they are linguistic figures that visualize the spoken. Based on this assumption and on the existing knowledge on the discourse analytical method of metaphor analysis, Part One of the article develops a method of visual metaphor analysi
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s (VMA). Part Two uses this method to examine the metaphors of peace found in the acclaimed movie Mango Dreams, the winner of the Peace on Earth Film Festival 2017. The film by John Upchurch tells a story of Dr. Amit Singh, whose family was killed by Muslims during the partition of India and who is suffering from the onset of dementia. In order to confront his fading memories and in pursuit of peace, he commences on a journey to his childhood home in what today is Pakistan. On his travel, he is aided by Muslim rickshaw driver Salim, whose wife was raped and murdered by Hindus. During the long journey across India in a rickshaw, the two form a close friendship and help each other find the peace they have been searching for. Based on our visual metaphor analysis (VMA) of the film, as well as an interview with the director, the article demonstrates how metaphors are employed to visualize a positive concept of peace, particularly HOME, JOURNEY, and BRIDGE, which has a specific temporal, spatial, and moral dimension. In contrast to much of the international relations research on visualization of peace and conflict, the conceptualizations of peace in Mango Dreams metaphorically envision positive peace, instead of the more familiar conceptualization of negative peace, through a representation of PEACE not only in terms of a place (HOME) or process (JOURNEY) but as practice (BRIDGE)." (Abstract)
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"Campaigns and movements targeting corruption often face decentralized targets rather than an identifiable dictator or external government, and can be found both in undemocratic and democratic systems. Graft and abuse are manifested in a systemic manner rather than a hodgepodge collection of illicit
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transactions. Consequently, this research brings to light new applications of civil resistance beyond the more commonly known cases against occupations, such as the Indian independence movement, and authoritarian regimes from Chile to Poland. It also expands our understanding about the dynamics of how people collectively wield nonviolent power for the common good. The focus of this research is on citizen agency: what civic actors and regular people—organized together and exerting their collective power—are doing to curb corruption as they define and experience it. Hence, the analytical framework is based on the skills, strategies, objectives, and demands of such initiatives, rather than on the phenomenon of corruption itself, which has been judiciously studied for more than two decades by scholars and practitioners from the anticorruption and development realms. I selected cases that met the following criteria: they were “popular” initiatives. They were civilian-based, involved grassroots participation, and were led and implemented by individuals from the civic realm, rather than governments or external actors, such as donors, development institutions, and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs); they were nonviolent. They did not threaten or use violence to further their aims; they involved some degree of organization and planning, which varied depending on the scope—objectives, geographical range, duration—of the civic initiative; multiple nonviolent actions were employed (thus, instances of one-off demonstrations or spontaneous protests were not considered); objectives and demands were articulated; the civic initiative was sustained over a period of time." (Introduction, pages 2-3)
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