According to social identity theory, identity competition plays a central role in the inception and escalation of intergroup conflict, even when economic and political factors also are at play. Individual and group identity competition is considered a byproduct of individuals' efforts to satisfy basic human needs, including various psychological needs. Religions often serve these psychological needs more comprehensively and potently than other repositories of cultural meaning that contribute to the construction and maintenance of individual and group identities. Religions frequently supply cosmologies, moral frameworks, institutions, rituals, traditions, and other identity-supporting content that answers to individuals' needs for psychological stability in the form of a predictable world, a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and even self-actualization. The peculiar ability of religion to serve the human identity impulse thus may partially explain why intergroup conflict so frequently occurs along religious fault lines.
This chapter considers the ways in which liberal institutions and approaches to peace mediation are inadequate for conflicts rooted in competing worldviews. Many of the most persistent and challenging conflicts are, and always have been, propelled by contending worldviews and their normative dictates. Yet peace mediation processes seem inadequately attuned to the drivers of such conflicts, and unresponsive to the core motivations and aspirations of conflict stakeholders. As a result, the default mechanisms, practices and mindsets that have been relied upon for decades in efforts to manage and resolve violent intra state and international conflict, including common modes of peace mediation, may no longer be fully up to the task. The chapter highlights this failure and proposes a strategy for peace mediation practice to engage in a more meaningful way with this tension.
Conflict resolution professionals sometimes differ from human rights professionals about the best approaches to transitional justice, particularly with regard to the scope, conditions, and timing of possible amnesties from prosecution for perpetrators of war crimes and human rights abuses. When human rights and conflict resolution professionals work at cross‐purposes, they may work less effectively to end conflict, abuses, and crimes, and to implement peace accords. A consensus among conflict resolution and human rights scholars about which legal norms should govern post‐conflict amnesty programs appears to be developing. Against this emerging legal framework, human rights and conflict resolution professionals should, I argue, develop processes for working together more effectively in the design and implementation of context‐sensitive approaches to transitional justice. These process principles should address the entire conflict period, from escalation through resolution to post‐conflict reconstruction. In this article, I describe a tentative, general framework for coordinating the development of transitional justice programs. This proposed framework is intended to stimulate and guide discussion of these issues among conflict resolution and human rights professionals and scholars.
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