Susan H. Allen - Confronting Peace: Local Peacebuilding in the Wake of a National Peace Agreement

This series provides a new space in which to interrogate and challenge much of the conventional wisdom of political violence. International and multidisciplinary in scope, this series explores the causes, types and effects of contemporary violence connecting key debates on terrorism, insurgency, civil war and peace-making. The timely Rethinking Political Violence offers a sustained and refreshing analysis reappraising some of the fundamental questions facing societies in conflict today and understanding attempts to ameliorate the effects of political violence.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14499

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We have been heartened by colleagues growing interest in local peace and in the stages of conflict that come after peace agreements. Peace is built and experienced locally, shaping individual lives. And, conflict continues in the days and years after peace agreements are signed. Here, we turn our attention to both the local peace and the post-agreement phase. What is the experience of local peace communities, after agreements have been signed? Addressing this and related questions has been a team effort, involving all the authors whose work appears in this book, as well as many additional colleagues.

The editors would like to thank the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution (formerly the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution) at George Mason University, and in particular the Center for Peacemaking Practice, for offering its facilities at Point of View in Virginia for the initial meeting that led to the idea of writing this book and for providing us with a small grant to make this meeting possible. Susan H. Allen would also like to thank the Carter School for her study leave, which enabled her to work on this edited volume, for funding her participation in a roundtable on the peace process in Colombia that took place in Quito, Ecuador, with the participation of various authors of this book, and for supporting research assistance by Michael Sweigert in the final stages of the manuscript production. Two members of the editorial team took advantage of this roundtable, supported by the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Ecuador and the office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in the same country, to organize a meeting with contributors writing chapters on Colombia and to further discuss the book. In addition to hosting the roundtable, Ccile Mouly would also like to thank FLACSO Ecuador for funding the research on Samaniego and her travel expenses to meet with other editors and some of the contributors at the conferences of the International Studies Association in Baltimore, San Francisco and Toronto.