The history of peace research offers a window onto mid-twentieth-century European political thought in transformation. This chapter focuses on the transformation of peace research from the 1960s to the 1980s, as it evolved a radical and trans-national approach to politics, linking developmentalist concerns with decolonisation and economic underdevelopment at the global scale to a critique of social hierarchies at the national scale. Historically located both after the post-war pursuit of European peace through economic growth and regional integration and before the emergence of Euromissile peace movements of the 1980s, one strand of peace research soon became an approach to social justice all of its own, and came to be known as ‘positive peace’. Positive peace was most prominent in the Nordic countries, where it offered a means of connecting nationally framed accounts of social democracy to more radical and utopian calls for social justice on all political scales. During these years of international encroachment and domestic upheaval in Europe, positive visions for peace provided a space within which European intellectuals responded to newly recognised global-scale injustices such as the Vietnam War and the spectre of global famine, as well as building a more just social order at home.

The international community is too often focused on responding to the latest cyber attack instead of addressing the reality of pervasive and persistent cyber conflict. From ransomware against the city government of Baltimore to state-sponsored campaigns targeting electrical grids in Ukraine and the United States, we seem to have relatively little bandwidth left over to ask what we can hope for in terms of “peace” on the Internet, and how to get there. It’s also important to identify the long-term implications for such pervasive cyber insecurity across the public and private sectors, and how they can be curtailed. This edited volume analyzes the history and evolution of cyber peace and reviews recent international efforts aimed at promoting it, providing recommendations for students, practitioners, and policymakers seeking an understanding of the complexity of international law and international relations involved in cyber peace. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The term “positive cyber peace” remains a concept laden with contradictions and ambiguity. A number of ontological tensions challenge the understanding of and, therefore, policy planning for cyber peace. Some advocates of cyber peace define it as a condition while others see it as a practice or set of practices. As a condition, cyber peace is sometimes defined as a kind of peace and at other times as something within cyber space. Distinct modes of ontologizing cyber peace as a set of practices include cyber peace as cyber peacemaking, as maintaining the stability of information technology, and/or as cyber defense actions. Further attention to scholarship about the terms “cyber” and “peace,” to boundary-setting distinctions between cyber peace and other social things, and to the implications of cyber peace metaphors suggest areas for further honing the conceptualization of this important term.

Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the book. It sets the scene by providing fundamental background information on the issues explored in the book. It then situates the present study within the existing literature. In so doing, it identifies the novel research questions, methodology, and contribution to debates in international law and beyond. It introduces key concepts that will be further discussed in the book, notably the idea of ‘new wars’ and its relationship to the environment. Further, it outlines two theories that provide the foundations and inform the critique developed in the book. The first is Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence and the second is the notion of structural violence, taken from Johan Galtung and adapted to the present issues. Lastly, it offers an overview of arguments made in subsequent chapters.

Explores the emerging subdiscipline of Peace Communication (PeaceComm), beginning with a discussion about the history of the practice, and the author’s ongoing quest to introduce a subdiscipline, dedicated to assessing and evaluating the critical efficacy of the practice. A methodological template for comparative global assessment and evaluation is offered, stressing the need to prioritize political conflict data and conflict zones-based context analyses, given that political conflict is caused by collective grievances related to “group”-level disadvantages and perceived disadvantages, not individual prejudice. The template is operationalized through the assessment of Sesame Street interventions into the Israeli Palestinian ethnopolitical nationalist conflict, drawn from field work in 2001, 2004-2006, and 2011. Best practices and other interdisciplinary contributions for practitioners are recommended, to understand conflict intractability where socialization, culture, and inter-“group” (mediated and interpersonal) communication intersect in glocalized conflict zone contexts, and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically. The interventions targeted children, who comprise the majority within conflict zones. The model used, mediated contact effects, is one of seven models and six subtypes of PeaceComm practiced historically worldwide the author has previously categorized, and is one of those most in need of PeaceComm scholarship, with potential to succeed but scarce evidence collected about its efficacy.

The term conflict management stands for a wide array of activities undertaken to prevent violent conflicts, to manage and end them once broken out, as well as to build peace and to avoid a recurrence of violence. Such activities include mediation between warring factions, military and civilian peacekeeping operations to oversee truces or peace agreements, peace enforcement, and post-conflict reconstruction, which comprises initiatives for state-building and socio-economic development amongst others. This chapter scrutinizes these activities and identifies factors that lead to peace. Itconcentrates on mediation and power-sharing as means to make peace, on military and civilian operations of international organizations as means to keep peace, as well as on the accommodation of spoilers, the design of peace operations, and transitional justice as means to build peace.

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.

In this chapter we evaluate not only how different paradigms approach the topic of peacebuilding but also how they compare and contrast with one another. This essay suggests that despite some clear incompatibilities, realism, liberalism, constructivism, cosmopolitanism, critical theory, public policy, and localism share some common ideas about how to pragmatically resolve conflicts, including focusing on the participants of these conflicts, developing locally grounded solutions, maintaining long-term commitments, and focusing on comprehensive approaches to peace. The main divide, we suggest, is between understandings of power in practice, with the more monist approaches positing that local actions come from structures that are not easily perceived. This critique, however, is minimized by the reality that all of the paradigms agree that peace cannot be sustained without both tempering the prerogatives of power with ideas of equality and consulting local actors. We conclude this chapter with comments about the benefits a cross-paradigmatic approach to peacebuilding has from methodological and theoretical standpoints.