Violence and Reconstruction (The RIREC Project on Post-Accord Peacebuiling)

"This well-organized and effective book could not be timelier. It sets out, and achieves, an ambitious program for itself." -Andrew Williams, University of Kent

"This volume makes an original contribution to the field and will be read with great interest by scholars, graduate students, and the policy community. The contributors present an important set of arguments that engage the scholarly and policy-oriented debates about peace implementation and peacebuilding by teasing out the complex and sometimes counterintuitive relationships between violence and peace." -Terrence Lyons, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University

This is the first book to focus on the effects of violence in internal conflicts after peace agreements have been signed. Since the mid-1990s many peace processes, including those in Israel-Palestine, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Northern Ireland, have reverted to violence while seeking to implement formal peace agreements. In all these cases the persistence and forms of violence have been among the main determinants of the success or failure of the peace process. Violence and Reconstruction adopts a four-part analysis, examining in turn violence emanating from the state, from militants, from destabilized societies, and from the challenge of implementing a range of policies including demobilization, disarmament, and policing.

Leading scholars explore in detail each of these aspects of postwar violence. Their findings draw attention to the increased willingness of the state to turn to militias to carry on violence by proxy; to the importance of distinguishing between the aims and actions of different militant groups; to a postwar rise in violent conventional crime; and to the importance of the proper restoration of civil society.