Zanker Legitimacy in Peacebuilding

The Role of Civil Society in Peace Negotiations
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-1-134-86123-1
Verlag: CRC Press
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 236 Seiten

The book offers a critical analysis of legitimacy in peacebuilding, with a focus on peace negotiations and civil society participation in particular.

Peacebuilding aims to profoundly restructure state-society relations, which can only succeed if stakeholders broadly accept it at different levels of society. There is a growing consensus amongst scholars and practitioners to address local agendas, aiming to ensure not only local ownership but also to improve legitimacy. The inclusion of a public agenda is argued to make peace processes more sustainable. Yet, how do peace negotiations – as the starting point for peacebuilding – become more legitimate? What does this have to do with civil society participation? The very idea of legitimacy itself remains a black box. The purpose of this book is to unpack the meaning of legitimacy in peacebuilding. Examining two case studies of negotiations in Liberia and Kenya, a detailed picture of the respective legitimisation processes is given. The empirical richness of the case studies generates important theoretical insights. In fact, civil society actors do not play an exclusive role in ensuring legitimacy. Significant contributions to legitimising processes like negotiations can also be made by other actors including mediators. Additionally, participation is conceptually more expansive than civil society representation. Thus, the civilian population can become active participants in constructing legitimacy through for example the artistic expression of their own grievances.

The book proposes a critique of buzzwords and fashionable concepts like local ownership, representation and participation. By re-constructing their meaning in the context of Liberia and Kenya, it makes a thorough theoretical contribution to how a process like peace negotiations can become legitimised because of participation and outcome-based characteristics. In the context of post-conflict societies like Liberia and Kenya, the question of legitimacy is especially pertinent. Interviews with over 100 stakeholders at the sub-national level, ranging from civil society activists, traditional leaders to politicians and 12 focus groups with market women, teachers and youth provides the background for the analysis. Methodologically, the book uses a specially adapted form of comprehensive process-tracing which combines both a constitutive and causal analysis, which resulted in a detailed and nuanced understanding of legitimisation processes.

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, security studies and IR in general.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zanker, Franzisca

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Friedens- und Konfliktforschung
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Staatsbürgerkunde, Staatsbürgerschaft, Zivilgesellschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. The Legitimacy of Peacebuilding and Peace Negotiations

2. Research Methodology

3. An Analytical Framework for Legitimate Peace Negotiations

4. Peace Negotiations in Liberia and Kenya

5. A Voice for the Voiceless: The Legitimacy of Civil Society Activism in Liberia

6. Silencing the Choir Masters: Civil Society and the Kenyan National Dialogue and Reconciliation

7. Towards a Theory of Legitimate Peace Negotiations

8. Unwrapping Legitimacy and Ownership in Peacebuilding

Über Autor(innen)

Franzisca L. Zanker is a research fellow at the GIGA Institute of African Affairs, Hamburg, Germany, and has a PhD in Political Science from Eberhard-Karls University, Tubingen, Germany.