Introduction to Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding
This course will be offered in the following terms.
1st term 2016 (March 14th - June 11th) → click here to enroll ←
Course instructor: Antonino Drago
The course presents a grassroots viewpoint on international interventions in crisis areas. Then develops according to three political assumptions; the need to ban nuclear weapons, the need to empower the UN as the present best opportunity for a socially empowering world government, and non-violence as the most valuable motivation inside the participants to the Peace movement.
The course makes use of the first chapters of the book by L. Schirch: Civilian Peacekeeping, Life and Peace, 2005 (online) about the immediate response of grassroots peacekeeping, as well the experiences accumulated in past decades. Then, it presents by means of the first two a theoretical examination of the historical change that mankind has to perform in view of a new notion of collective defence (peace as a paradigm shift). The present military paradigm is characterised in the details also of a structural kind, according to Galtung’s theory of a conflict as an A-B-C. To the crucial question whether there exists an alternative it is answered positively by paying attention to suggestions by the alternatives offered by the Western progressive movement and in the sciences too; accordingly, an alternative model of conflict resolution is illustrated; it turns out to be the Gandhian non-violent one. This structural theory of non-violent conflict resolution allows a detailed presentation of multiple aspects of the conflict to be considered by a Peacekeeping operation. This one is examined according to the two different models of conflict resolution which, being mutually incommensurable, stress the problem of a mutual translatability between the respective actors.
Then a peacekeeping operation is illustrated according to the three actors of the international political arena that are primarily involved in such operations. A State carries out peacekeeping operations according to the old paradigm that suggests that only military actions are capable of solving conflicts. Instead UN proposal of An Agenda for Peace is to perform three kinds of intervention, i.e. peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, all including civilians. The strict constraints and great potentialities of UN interventions are illustrated. NGO peacekeeping is presented in its main aspects, its several actualisations, its potentialities and successes. The remaining chapters of Schirch’s book are intermixed in order to complete the presentation of the last subject. A case-study, i.e. Palestine/Israel, is presented.
In order to offer a long-term strategy of NGO-interventions, the previous theory of conflict resolution is enlarged to a theory of non-violent politics, relying on the notion of a co-existence of four models of development, which both concur and conflict in specific aspects. By means of this basic notion, the political consciousness of the present world situation as well as the various components and strategies of the Peace movement is obtained. Eventually, the statistical study on all the revolutions in the 20th Century is shortly reported; among them the non-violent ones resulted to be both very frequent and highly successful.
