Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021 despite peace talk efforts in late 2020 and early 2021. International pundits had been predicting that Ashraf Ghani’s government might need to share power with a resurgent Taliban, but none had expected such a swift and complete takeover as the Americans readied to leave for good. Two decades of international intervention in Afghanistan were erased. The efficacy and desirability of intervention has been thrown into serious doubt, and with it the prospects for post-conflict state-building. This chapter introduces the rise, and possible fall, of the post-conflict state-building agenda. It introduces the reader to important concepts, noting the relationships between state-building, peace-building and nation-building, as well as underscoring the role of liberal ideology in shaping post-conflict state-building efforts, asking readers to reflect on what they believe external actors should, or should not, do.

This chapter provides the core argument and engages with concepts and theories relevant to the book. It begins with a comprehensive literature review of the turn to the local within transitional justice. While local transitional justice mechanisms are supposed to better align with the needs and priorities of affected populations, often these programs are measured against their own goals, or normative expectations of transitional justice, which overlooks how individuals and communities navigate these programs in multiple and diverse ways. This book examines different types of agency of Sierra Leoneans in what I refer to as recognised and unrecognised local transitional justice processes. Using Fambul Tok as an example of a recognised local transitional justice program, the book explores how various types of agency are involved in constructing and shaping local TJ programs, often resulting in a range of unintended consequences. This book builds upon scholarship in a range of disciplines including peace and conflict studies, anthropology, development, politics and social and legal studies. Ultimately, the book argues that justice does not happen to or for people, but that is an act in and of itself. It illustrates how local programs and processes actually work in practice.

Intrastate armed conflict has become the most frequent and deadly form of engagement in the world after the end of the Cold War. The massification of the use of Information and Communication Technologies and the digitization of political activities have turned intrastate conflicts into information-centric conflicts. In this context, cyberspace can be a battlefield as well as a space to conduct peacebuilding activities. Drawing upon literatures in conflict resolution and cybersecurity, this chapter proposes a definition of cyber peacebuilding as an active concept that captures those actions that delegitimize online violence, build capacity within society to peacefully manage online communication, and reduce vulnerability to triggers that may spark online violence. Cyber peacebuilding can also shed light on the relationship between intrastate conflicts and global cyber peace, contributing to raise awareness about cyberthreats in the Global South. The chapter uses the cases of Colombia and South Africa in order to illustrate the challenges and prospects of cyber peacebuilding organized around the four pillars of cyberspace outlined in this volume. Moreover, it argues that cyber peacebuilding in the Global South is an essential element of the emergence of cyber peace as a global public good.

BHR is a fast-evolving interdisciplinary field and naturally its focus expands over time and new subdiscussions start to emerge. Such new discussions often appear at the intersection between BHR and other fields. This chapter briefly outlines four selected emerging discussions within the BHR field, namely: the intersection between BHR and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the relevance of climate change for BHR, gender perspectives on BHR, and BHR in post-conflict and transitional justice contexts.

Experiments are increasingly used to better understand various aspects of civil conflict. A critical barrier to peace is often conflict recurrence after a settlement or other attempt to end fighting between sides. This chapter examines the growing literature on experiments in post-conflict contexts to understand their contributions and limitations to our understanding of the dynamics in this period. It argues that work on post-conflict contexts takes two different perspectives: a peace stabilization approach emphasizes special problems from civil conflict, including how to sustain peace agreements, while a peace consolidation approach emphasizes problems common to statebuilding, including how to reconstruct communities. Both seek in part to prevent conflict recurrence, though, and that is the focus of this chapter. Although more existing theory links stabilization programs with enduring peace, more existing experiments examine consolidation programs. Both approaches would benefit from new work. Post-conflict contexts in general, however, are difficult environments in which to work, and so experiments face three interrelated challenges: first, these contexts present special ethical challenges due to both the high stakes of peace and the sensitivity of subjects; second, these are complex treatments often conducted simultaneously by different actors, and these are treatments that depend on both institutional change and behavioral responses, so change is the constant in these contexts; and, third, these contexts also face heterogeneity in terms of programs but also contexts that mean the lessons may not travel even among post-conflict settings. Despite these challenges, experiments in post-conflict contexts hold promise for advancing our understanding of enduring peace.

Social unrest and warfare in emerging markets can create opportunities for innovation. By focusing on Colombia, where armed conflict and post-conflict challenges have motivated innovation in the military and business domains, this chapter examines innovation in places where social demands create opportunities for deep societal transformations. We describe the processes by which the armed forces developed innovative military strategies in wartime to win an unconventional and long-standing guerrilla war. During the post-conflict period, businesses created new business models, going much further than traditional practices of social responsibility to become real actors in building a peaceful society and contributing to the economic development of regions historically affected by the armed conflict.

There is little value in affirming the existence of the right to victims of armed conflict to reparation if it is not clear how massive numbers of victims could access to reparation. The chapter shows how accessibility is essential for guaranteeing this right, offering concrete proposals. As human rights law is an important tool for determining the existence of this right, experiences implementing massive forms of reparation for victims of human rights violations also serve to determine its operationalization. This requires adapting basic notions about the right to reparation designed for addressing individual claims to situations where individualized methods for determining rights will result on the exclusion of the vast majority of victims. The chapter examines the experiences of the UN Compensation Commission and the Ethiopia-Eritrea Compensation Commission, as well as of reparations programs implemented in Guatemala, Peru, Sierra Leone, Colombia, and Chile. It analyses how these policies determined the violations to cover, reparation measures, registering victims, and guaranteeing accessibility of vulnerable victims, women and those frequently excluded. These experiences offer criteria for interpreting notions of proportionality, restitutio in integrum, compensation, and standards of evidence, as well as the relationship with judicial reparation, reconstruction, and development in post conflict situations.

The shift to a more victim-oriented understanding of the right to reparation has been developing in tandem with the successive creation of international criminal judiciaries, as well as ad hoc reparation mechanisms, established since the early 1990s, in parallel with the drafting of relevant UN instruments. However, the abstract question about the existence of such a right is not particularly helpful because the individual substantive right and procedural right are closely intertwined. The concrete content of the right to reparation has to be defined under specific historical circumstances, taking into account the specific challenges of concrete post-conflict constellations. The substance of a right to reparation only can and should be defined as the result of an adequate procedure established under such circumstances. Accordingly, this chapter, based on the analyses of various reparation mechanisms so far established, contributes to identify and elaborate the detailed elements of the right to reparation, including the basic shared principles and methods through which a mechanism could effectively process individual claims. This also clarifies the shifting purpose of reparation not only to deliver remedial justice to victims, but also to realise restorative justice which emphasises reconciliation in States and local communities at the post-conflict stage.

Taking inspiration from Edna Longley’s notion of the ‘cultural corridor’, this chapter emphasises Post-Agreement literature’s commitment to Northern Ireland as a place of interchange that enables and envisages various crossings. Rather than accepting the ‘post’ as a temporal marker that designates a distinct break with what came before, it contends that contemporary Northern writing raises awareness of what remains to be worked through and addressed. If critics have suggested that literature from Northern Ireland reflects its ongoing political state of liminal suspension, this chapter seeks to recover the recalcitrant dynamics of literary liminality as a crosscurrent to the homogenising and teleological thrust of the progress narratives underpinning both the Agreement and Brexit. This emphasis on the active energies suggested by the motif of crosscurrents allows a revision of the more passive concepts of the cultural corridor and suspension and foregrounds the potential of contemporary Northern Irish literature to establish new affiliations and reconciliatory discussions.

This chapter looks at the modalities through which impartiality can be guaranteed in a context as fraught and highly politicized as post-war Kosovo, and explores how impartiality is produced in the everyday at the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA). The KPA is a quasi-judicial institution put in place by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to ‘resolve’ war-related property claims and thereby restitute property rights to, for a great majority of claims, Kosovo Serbian ‘displaced persons’. The chapter argues that impartiality is produced and made possible by different, seemingly contradictory repertoires of justice that are acted out in everyday practice by the national lawyers of the agency. It probes the tenets of the dialectic between ‘global’ ideals and ‘local’ practice, and ethnographically demonstrates the limits of an anthropology of human rights that sees vernacularization and meaning-making as the only analytical tools available. The chapter shows that, in the specific political landscape of post-war Kosovo, it is the ‘nationalistic bias’ of Kosovo Albanian lawyers that ensures due diligence and respect for rule of law principles.