In a world where war is everybody's tragedy and everybody's nightmare, diplomacy is everybody's business. —Lord Strang1 This paper presents a comprehensive review of the conflict resolution and peace‐building literature focused on the issues involved in assessing the impact of peacemaking and peace‐building through people‐to‐people contact. Findings reveal that we are still in the beginning stages of establishing frameworks for the resolution of wars and the building of peace and that there continues to be academic and political contestation over the definition of peace and peace‐building. At the same time, this review identifies significant research progress in creating useful conceptual distinctions among the various modalities for peace, in establishing definitions that are both explanatory and remedial, and in recognizing the need for multi‐faceted approaches to peacemaking and peace‐building. Likewise, the literature indicates a growing understanding of the various forms of people‐to‐people contact, their impact, their possibilities, and their limitations. Attempts are made to reconcile the tensions between structural and social‐psychological approaches, and similarly, the contradictions between conflict resolution and social justice. Finally, directions for future research that address the impact, the effectiveness, and the possibilities for creating an infrastructure for a sustainable just peace.

Coalitions are among the most important tactical tools available for social movements and civil resistance campaigns, as they enable the sharing of networks, resources, expertise, and information, while simultaneously projecting an image of power through unity and numbers. Though exceptionally challenging to build, diverse coalitions are viewed by many as particularly important. However, there is considerably less literature that explicitly discusses them. In this article, I review the literature on diverse coalitions, with a focus on both their theorized and documented importance for social movements and civil resistance campaigns, and the challenges they face (including the factors working against their formation and sustainability). To do so, I bring two closely related but often separate literatures into conversation: social movements and civil resistance. I conclude by evaluating the state of this research area, highlighting remaining gaps, and suggesting directions for future research.

For collective action to occur and be sustainable, social movements must construct collective identities and develop a sense of themselves as collective actors. This is especially difficult for movements that work across deep political and cultural chasms, and in situations of protracted conflict. Yet, there has been almost no research on how movement organizations, which work across conflict lines in situations of protracted conflict, are able to establish this sense of cohesion. This project investigates how two joint Israeli-Palestinian peace movement organizations are able to construct shared collective identities in a political environment where each side is cast as the enemy of the other. The findings indicate that in protracted conflicts, trust building is a distinct and critical process inherent in constructing a collective identity. The findings similarly reveal that while storytelling goes a long way toward establishing trust initially, ultimately, collective identity construction depends on visible confirmatory actions.

No abstract

No abstract