Post Conflict Issues

After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005, just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh’s coastal communities. This article presents a medical hu-manitarian case study based on ethnographic data I collected while working for a large aid agency in post-conflict Aceh from 2005 to 2007. In December 2005, the agency faced the first test of its medical and negotiation capacities to provide psychiatric care to a recently amnestied political prisoner whose erratic behavior upon returning home led to his re-arrest and detention at a district police station. I juxtapose two methodological approachesdan ethnographic content analysis of the agency’s email archive and field-based participant-observationdto recount contrasting narrative versions of the event. I use this contrast to illustrate and critique the immediacy of the humanitarian imperative that characterizes the industry. Immediacy is explored as both an urgent moral impulse to assist in a crisis and a form of mediation that seemingly projects neutral and transparent transmission of content. I argue that the sense of immediacy afforded by email enacts and amplifies the humanitarian imperative at the cost of abstracting elite humanitarian actors out of local and moral context. As a result, the management and mediation of this psychiatric case by email produced a bureaucratic model of care that failed to account for complex conditions of chronic political and medical instability on the ground.

Transitional justice (TJ) has developed in relative isolation from development discourse. However, in recent years, a growing number of academics, practitioners and policy makers have advocated for the adaptation of participatory methods from development studies to TJ. This article critically analyses the opportunities and challenges of implementing participation in TJ. I argue that participation can provide avenues for the voices of victims and other stakeholders to be heard, albeit not without significant challenges. I also argue that there should be increased focus to carry out participatory attempts where victims and affected community members are partners and decision makers; this just might be a starting point to ensure that TJ is indeed victim-centric.

""Mediating Across Difference is based on a fundamental premise: to deal adequately with conflict—and particularly with conflict stemming from cultural and other differences—requires genuine openness to different cultural practices and dialogue between different ways of knowing and being. Equally essential is a shift away from understanding cultural difference as an inevitable source of conflict, and the development of a more critical attitude toward previously under-examined Western assumptions about conflict and its resolution.

To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalizing world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the editors present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict.""

This paper examines the processes of status bargaining of two Serbian enclaves in Kosovo with the central government in Pristina. It develops a middle range theoretical model of enclave bargaining in order to account for different claims advanced against the center, by focusing on different practices and institutions of ethnic enclaves. Ethnic groups are largely viewed as unitary actors by dominant theories on claim making. This research shows that these groups are sometimes fragmented and have divergent interests, depending on their territorial position and demographic patterns. The changes in radicalization of enclavised ethnic groups are explained as a function of their bargaining leverage, which depends on the incentives offered to these enclaves by their external lobby actors and the host government.