Book review — Comparing Peace Processes (eds Alpaslan Özerdem and Roger Mac Ginty)
by Ewan NIXON
28 May 2024
With the Institute for Economics and Peace recording conflict-related deaths increasing by 96% in 2023 and internationalised conflicts increasing nine-fold in the last 20 years, there is certainly an argument that the study of past peace processes has found new relevance in the 21st century. The book Comparing Peace Processes, by Alpaslan Özerdem and Roger Mac Ginty, aims to tackle this expansive and diverse subject to offer insight into how conducting comparative analysis can aid in designing and implementing policy in the future.
Özerdem and Mac Ginty are right to acknowledge the difficulty and complexity of producing a practical approach to the concept of comparing peace processes, noting that “peace is not only a context-based phenomenon but also very much depends on how it is lived, enacted and embodied in everyday lives”. Because of the influence of context and history, critics of the comparative approach suggest there is little use in attempting to identify similarities between peace processes, because the events and factors that contribute to societal breakdown and conflict can often differ to such a large extent.
Nevertheless, the book effectively identifies eleven common factors in establishing a lasting peace, such as good governance, legacy issues, public participation/inclusion, and the economic impact of violence. Particular emphasis is placed on the social aspect of peace processes and the impact of legacy, with Mac Ginty noting that there is “no set date on legacy. Conflicts that occurred centuries ago can still be used as mobilisation tools.” To a certain extent, this could be considered a drawback to the book’s approach to comparative analysis, as it can be difficult to identify a definitive and objective link between socio-historic issues and their impact on peace.
Despite the in-depth analysis provided by Özerdem and Mac Ginty, the objectives of the book face some challenges in this regard. The prominence of quantitative data, whilst very useful, risks overlooking the diverse and nuanced contexts that lie behind each conflict. The authors themselves acknowledge this limitation, suggesting that while common factors can be identified, the unique contexts of each case study make creating a common approach to peacebuilding extremely difficult. As the book highlights, legacy issues and historical grievances have continued to fuel contemporary conflicts, but it provides useful insight into how long-standing issues can be utilised for political gain and highlights the complexity for policymakers in achieving closure and reconciliation.
Some of these drawbacks are addressed in later chapters by Özerdem and Mac Ginty’s inclusion of quantitative studies of social factors, such as public participation and approval. In terms of factors that can be more easily measured by data, the authors place heavy emphasis on the impact of economics and argue that it is at the heart of many conflicts. With violence estimated to have cost the global economy $17.5 trillion in 2023, the book highlights a very important link between the economic cost of violence and its influence on social factors, and identifies economic inequality, low public participation, and food insecurity as massive contributors towards violent outcomes. The authors ultimately conclude, “Without the issues of economics, justice and legacy addressed effectively, the transformation from “negative peace” to “positive peace” is not likely to take place, posing serious threats to the sustainability of a peace process.”
The book also addresses our own situation with a chapter focused on Northern Ireland, which is used to illustrate broader themes in peace processes, including inclusivity, addressing grievances, and the role of international actors. The chapter, written by Mac Ginty, provides a useful timeline of all stages of our peace process and the challenges it faced, and offers valuable insight into the influence of the international community in a peace process, with “symmetry” being identified as one of the most important aspects of maintaining peaceful outcomes.
Using the diplomacy of the United States as an example, the authors highlight the positive influence the US government had in the Northern Irish peace process, whilst exposing how continued US support of Israel on the international stage has ultimately been an exacerbating factor in the Israel–Palestine conflict. The book leans heavily towards this concept, noting that out of all its case studies, peace processes with constructive external engagement were amongst the most likely to succeed.
Özerdem and Mac Ginty close the project with a numerical approach to their study of these different contexts, rating each case study on a scale between one and five, and mapping out a table of successes and failures in each peace process. In doing so, the book highlights an academic gap, in that in order to arrive at a numeric assessment of a peace process, a “judgement call” must be made that might be prone to subjective factors. To mitigate this, the authors have used the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP), as part of their methodology. The UCDP is a leading provider of data collection on organised violence and civil war, and the authors have applied the organisation’s research in order to identify keywords that best define each context. The book’s approach to this does a good job of bringing the research conducted on the 18 case studies to a strong conclusion, and would be particularly useful for policymakers, as it provides strong evidence for many of the common factors identified in the earlier chapters.
Ultimately, Comparing Peace Processes is an ambitious project that succeeds in its aim of highlighting the vastly different contexts behind both historical and contemporary conflicts, and identifies key concepts that can be gauged from their study. Despite some challenges from the scale of the subject matter, Özerdem and Mac Ginty have created an effective assessment of the 18 case studies researched. Whilst the comparative methodology to the study of peace may not produce an all-encompassing approach to building it, that was arguably never an objective of the book, with the closing chapter stating that one of its main aims was rather to “compare not the success or failure of a peace process, but the challenge of making and building peace in these very different environments”, and with the work of organisations such as the IEP and UCDP proving that the study of peace and conflict can be empirically measured, this book serves as a useful and insightful supplement to other styles of peace research.
