This chapter examines how the situating of individuals and states in societal contexts holds implications for understanding the causes conflict and the generation of peace. It challenges the strict agent-centered state-centricity of traditionalist approaches and looks at the roles played by different societal constraints, norms, and processes at the international and domestic levels.I provide a discussion of the core assumptions of social constructivism andcompare social constructivism’s approach to peace with the other major paradigms (and their subparadigms) assessed in this book. Iconsider how the rational default mechanisms of security studies and the realist or power political paradigms, which have dominated the discourse for much of the period of scientific study, have come to be critiqued. This will be followed by detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between social constructivism and liberal approaches, functionalism, English School rationalism, critical approaches, and cosmopolitanism. I assess the contribution of social constructivismto the transformation of conflictual relations between states and the social construction of peace.

That constructivism appears to be everywhere and nowhere in thinking about contemporary peacebuilding is a paradox attributable to the nature of constructivism itself.Ultimately, the essential contribution of constructivism to thinking aboutglobal politics and peacebuilding can be distilled to one simple idea: norms matter.Acknowledging there is no coherent constructivist peacebuilding paradigm, our aim in this chapter is to demonstrate the inherently constructivist nature of both the theory and the practice of peacebuilding and how they work iteratively to produce norms and reinforce practice. We examine the core assumptions of constructivism and the theoretical intersections between constructivism and peacebuilding. We then lay out generations of peacebuilding, reflecting on the normative theorizing that shaped them, and related policy and practice, illustrating how they iteratively shaped one another. We emphasize how a greater focus on a multidirectional process of norm contestation provides valuable insights into ways norms evolve and their impact on peacebuilding.We conclude by suggesting how peacebuilders and constructivists can advance the cause of peace.

The volume closes by setting out an agenda for further research that follows from the findings of the case studies in three governance areas of security, environmental, and business governance. Based on the findings, we argue that responsibility should be considered as a methodological tool for scholars of global politics as it bridges the gap between politics, law, and ethics. The role of ethics in particular deserves further engagement, and responsibility as a category of practice provides a suitable approach towards this end. As the literature on ‘virtue ethics’ has highlighted, neither universal benchmarks nor a reliance on consequentialist arguments offer suitable leverage for analysis for communities and norms that develop and are maintained in practice. Rather, it is through an engagement with practices of knowledge creation and embedded ethics of the actors involved that we can shed light on the workings of global politics. Virtue ethics may be used for a critical and emancipatory research agenda that could be expanded to look into, for instance, global North-South relations or non-Western governance proposals.

This essay develops a conceptual frame for the analysis of peace under a comparative area perspective.I discussthe main concepts (peace, violence, conflict) and assess them in relation to four main theoretical schools (realism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, critical), demonstrating in the process how a global approach to peace resolves many of the difficulties these theoretical schools encounter by placing specific emphasis on the need to focus a lens on both international and national dynamics across cases. I also address the problem of reliable comparable date and suggest that a comparative area studies approach may be preferable as a means to measure the potential for and progress toward peace.I provide evidence for the added value of such a perspective based on an analysis of peace in Latin America. The concluding section discusses the necessity of a hybrid outlook on peace, which requires sustained action on the part of international and local actors toward reducing conditions of structural violence, and it formulates some avenues for future research.

Chapter 8 examines Israel’s regional foreign policy during the first Netanyahu government, in relation to three themes: the peace agreement with Jordan, relations with Syria, and relations with the Arab states in the Gulf. The chapter demonstrates that, during this period, Israel pursued a foreign policy of backtracking on engagement. The warm peace with Jordan became a cooler strategic peace. Relations with the Gulf countries were frozen and the Maghreb states all but severed their ties with Israel. Meanwhile, Syria and Israel were on the brink of war. The retraction from the foreign policy of engagement was entirely in line with the unmitigated hostility of the prime minister and his immediate circle towards the Arab world, and his clear preference for satisfying his core domestic political constituency over advancing the peace process. The chapter adds to the existing literature by exposing the divisions within Israel’s foreign policymakers, in government and the security network, amid the prime minister’s foreign policy of backtracking from engagement.

Chapter 17 provides the first analysis of the causes and consequences shaping Israel’s foreign policy towards established and emerging powers beyond the Middle East two decades after the end of the Cold War. The chapter identifies two contradicting trends in Israel’s foreign policy towards China, India, the EU, and the USA. On the one hand, the economic ties with all four countries had deepened and expanded significantly. On the other, Israel’s foreign policy towards all four power remains vulnerable to different degrees. In the case of the USA and EU, the deepening Israeli occupation of the Palestinians poses a normative threat to the long-term endurance of these relationships. As far as Israel-China and Israel-India ties are concerned, they are contingent on these powers’ economic interests in Arab Gulf States - and to a lesser extent Iran - and their burgeoning ties with Israel remaining compartmentalized.

This chapterestablishes peacebuilding as a historically and theoretically evolving concept and practice. Peacebuilding already has prisms open to multiple understandings. Nevertheless, seeing peacebuilding as apolicy process enables us to comprehend that the whole idea and activity cannot be understood from one paradigm exclusively. It is a mixed activity, while still oriented to realizing an ultimate goal,"peace," which has multiple goals and serves multiple interests. Weprovide a comparative analysis of peacebuilding with existing IR theories.Weidentify both similarities and differences between peacebuilding as a policy paradigm and the various IR theories. We contend that the policy approach could complement other theories and further contribute to both academic and practical understandings of peacebuilding. It becomes clearthat peacebuilding is not only a static picture of the theoretical mosaic but a hybrid approachwithdynamic interactions among actors and theories.

Chapter 5 examines Israel’s foreign policy of engagement in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. It traces and explains the key events, including rejection of the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement, the rise and fall of the Wye River negotiations with Syria, the assassination of the Hamas leader, Yahya Ayyash, Operation Grapes of Wrath, and the defeat of Shimon Peres by Binyamin Netanyahu in the 1996 general elections. The chapter contributes to the literature by explaining why, following Rabin’s assassination, his successor, Shimon Peres, sought to apply his New Middle East vision to negotiations with Syria and the Palestinians and why this foreign policy approach failed. The chapter ends by examining the final demise of the Peres government and of Israel’s foreign policy of engagement amid Binyamin Netanyahu’s victory in the 1996 elections. It underscores that Netanyahu’s victory personified the rejection by the Jewish-Israeli public of Israel’s engagement policy, on the grounds that it compromised the country’s Jewish and Zionist identity and posed grave security threats.

The need for a new approach to peace isself-evident. A novel perspective that can go beyond systemic understanding of the behavior of human communities is required to offer new insight into the workings of peace and the outbreak of war. The Islamic gnostic outlook does exactly that. Without any claims to the political leadership of human communities and bereft of ideology and dogmatism, the mysticinquiry on war and peace turns its attention from the structural trademark of systemic approaches to the agency of the most fundamental unit, the individual. It ascertains that the roots of all good and evil are found within ourselves; we hold the key to understandingthe defects of our outward social and political behavior. In this essay, Idescribe Islamic mysticism and discuss its importance for peace and peace processes. I next discuss mysticism and the idea of self-negation, and I comparemysticism’s notion of peace with the concept of peace embodied in several theoretical schools. Iexamine the rather dismal prospect for peace engendered by Western paradigms and demonstrate how Islamic mysticism holds greater promise for achieving positive peace.