Conflict and Peace Building in Divided Societies: Responses to Ethnic Violence

This groundbreaking book provides an integrated account of ethnic, nationality and sectarian conflicts in the contemporary world including the role of collective myths, the mass media and the ethnification of identities as contributors to ethnic conflicts and wars. In addition to many examples from the last two decades, Oberschall provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict and peace processes in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Oberschall analyzes:

• peace building through constitutional design
• power sharing governance
• disarming combatants, post-accord security and refugee return
• transitional justice (truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes tribunals)
• economic and social reconstruction in a multiethnic society.

In addition to many examples from the last two decades, Oberschall provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict and peace processes for Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Israel-Palestinians. He argues that insurgency creates contentious issues over and above the original root causes of the conflict, that the internal divisions within the adversaries trigger conflicts that jeopardize peace processes, and that security and rebuilding a failed state are a precondition for lasting peace and a democratic polity.

This book will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of peace studies, war and conflict studies, ethnic studies and political sociology.

Anthony Oberschall was educated at Harvard and earned a PhD in sociology at Columbia in 1962. He has taught at UCLA, Yale and since 1980 at the University of North Carolina, where he is now Emeritus Professor. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a New Century Scholar in the Fulbright program. He has taught and researched in East and Central Africa, the People's Republic of China, and Germany, France and Hungary, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland. Among his books are Social Conflict and Social Movements (1973) and Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests, and Identities (1993). Since the late 1980s, he has studied, lectured and written on conflict and conflict management in divided societies.