Social Psychology Paper

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THEORETICAL CONCEPTS TO CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND PEACE BUILDING IN DIVIDED SOCIETIES

Biljana POPOVSKA1

Abstract: Reconciliation is a long-term process of resolving the antagonisms in culture and identity-based conflicts. It involves a transition from contesting to cooperation, including recon- struction of the society and creating conditions for normal cooperation and life. Some authors call it “transformation” (Lederach), or peacemaking (Curle). They define conflict transforma- tion as a solution, which involves transformation of enmity relations into mutual acceptance and cooperation between the actors of the conflict. The conflict could lay dormant and activate from time to time unless reconciliation is achieved among the conflicting sides. Thus, instead, a sustainable peace the society is polarized and divided societies conducive to occasional or continuous escalation of new conflicts are formed. Peacebuilding links together different threads from conflict prevention, crisis management, peacemaking, and post conflict stabilization often challenged with efficiency, coordination and sustainability which impose the need for good knowledge of the current peacebuilding architecture. This paper is a small contribution in that line and an effort to give an overview of the different concepts of conflict resolution and peace building.

Key words: theoretical concepts, conflict resolutions, peace building, integrated approach, divided societies, reconciliation.

Introduction The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some theoretical concepts relevant to con-

flict resolution and peace building in divided societies. My general hypothesis states: The Ohrid Framework Agreement, which ended the escalation of the fighting in the Republic of Macedonia, has nonetheless for ten years perpetuated the underlying conflict, albeit in a latent form. It has arguably preserved the internal security of the country and made possible the sustainable security of Macedo- nian society. However, a negative tendency can sometimes be seen in certain educational indicators, not to mention the obvious segregation of society along ethnic lines. Therefore, it is important to find out what lies behind the lingering post-Ohrid discontent”. As Richard Solomon asserts, sustainable peace requires long-time antagonists not merely to lay down their arms but to achieve profound reconciliation that will endure because it is sustained. It builds a society-wide network of relation- ships and mechanisms that promote justice and addresses the root causes and enmity before they can

1 The author (MA) is lecturer, Military Academy of Republic of Macedonia

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regenerate destabilizing tensions2. Peacebuilding does not start and stop with say, the launch and the termination of a UN operation, or with the establishment of political parties or the holding of elections. Rather, “peacebuilding is understood as a comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships.3 The nature and characteristics of contemporary conflict suggest the need for a set of concepts and approaches that go beyond traditional statist diplomacy. Construct- ing the house of peace relies on a foundation of multiple actors and activities aimed at achieving and sustaining reconciliation4. In lieu with it, this paper will provide an overview of concepts and definitions followed by the players involved in the peace building process. We cannot hope that it can be comprehensive, but the aim is nevertheless to provide not only a general introduction to the topic but also context for future analyses of specific aspects of peacebuilding. It aims to point out the importance of the reconciliation in the process of establishing a sustainable peace In addition to give the construct to create specific cases like the case of post conflict Macedonia by trying to answer the question as to whether the country is moving into a direction of a divided society or not. This would justify why most of the concepts, notions and ideas below are related to ethnic conflict as such has been the conflict in the Republic of Macedonia.

Concepts, notions and ideas related to ethnic armed conflict

According to Kaufman, an author citied by Anthony Oberschall5:“Ethnic group” denotes a large aggregate of people who have a self-defined name, believe they share a common descent, have common historical memories and elements of shared culture (such as religion and language), and have an attachment (even if only historical and sentimental) to a specific territory. Horowitz, another author cited by Oberschall writes “Ethnic groups tend to have solidarity and we-feeling; their members experience something of “ourselves” in each other”. “Nationality refers to a large group of people having a common and distin- guishing racial, linguistic, and cultural background, and forming a constituent element of a larger group”6. The two terms, “ethnic group” and “nationality,” overlap and often used synonymously.

Obershall argues that well-being in a society depends not only on person-to-person transactions but also on collective goods. Consensus on collective goods (e.g. language, group identity, collective symbols of shared values and group dignity as expressed in the celebration of holidays, the naming of streets and public monuments, the role of religion in public life) reduces contentious conflicts in politics and makes for low-cost governance. Ethnic groups tend to have a viable communal organization with dense interpersonal net- working and cultural, social, and religious associations embedded in the ethnic community. Political mobilization of ethnic groups does not start from scratch. Ethnic activists redirect a preexisting robust ethnic infrastructure of associations and networks to political pursuits, adapting ethnic symbols and loyalties to political goals.

2 Richard Solomon in Lederach, 1997:Foreword 3 Lederach, 1997 4 Ibid. 5 Oberschall, A.2007 6 Webster’sThird New International Dictionary, 1981

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Theories of ethnic conflict

There is no shortage of theories about the causes of these conflicts. Each suggests a particular mode of ethnic conflict management. Ancient hatred (AH) assumes that ethnic identities and group membership are primordial, sharply distinct, resilient to change, salient across all institutions and activities, and present high risk for repeated destructive conflicts (Kaplan, 1994)7. Ethnic groups resist assimilation and erosion despite education and eth- nic relations are burdened with collective myths, fears, and hostile emotions. Embedded in culture and socialization, their histories highlight past conflicts and threats from other groups. Manipulative elites (ME) assume social construction of ethnic identities rather than primordial origins (Gagnon 1994/5)8. Ethnic elites contend for power by manipulating ethnic divisions and blowing them out of proportion with fear and hate propaganda. Rival lead- ers demonize ethnic opponents who can never be trusted and must therefore be dominated or defeated. Identity politics (IP) holds that divisive ethnic myths, symbols, stereotypes, and fears are embedded in folk culture, socialization, and institutions of divided societies (Kaufman 2001)9. Conflict management consists of building overarching shared identities and symbols, and providing political institutions that organize interest and divisions that cut across ethnic lines. Security dilemma (also referred to as the spiral of insecurity) holds that, under conditions of state failure and breakdown (approaching anarchy), all groups fear for their life and property, and some ethnic groups mobilize for their own defense against rivals they view as threatening, including by arming, which in turn is threatening to other groups, who in turn arm, which leaves all more insecure and stimulates further mobilization and countermobilization, as in an arms race between states (Posen 1993)10. The process can be modeled as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. What drives the conflict is not hatred, as in AH, but mistrust and fear. Economic roots (ER) disputes that ethnic divisions are at the root of major contemporary internal armed conflicts (Collier et al. 2003)11. Instead, ER holds that the root causes of such conflicts are poverty, economic stagnation, unemployment, corrup- tion, and a failed state on the demand side, and warlords organizing unemployed young men into armed bands, opportunities for making a living by aggression and robbery, trafficking in narcotics, controlling revenues from natural resources such as oil and diamonds, and favorable terrain for insurgency on the supply side.

All of the above theories could be true, but that is not decisive for peace making. What happens is that violent conflict fuels ethnic hatred, brings to power manipulative elites, creates fear and insecurity, is responsible for economic ruin, and fosters exclusive identities and divisive symbols. What conflict managers and peacemakers have to do is to deal with these consequences of conflict, whatever the status quo ante. In Chaim Kaufmann’s words, “solutions to ethnic wars do not depend on their causes” (1996: 137)12.

7 Oberschall, A. 2007 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

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Peace making is a phase of a longer process of changing relationships among adver- saries and third parties. There are relatively stable periods when the conflict lies dormant. Obershall refers to these processes as “conciliation and conflict dynamics,” CCD for short. As Obershall writes, CCD is less than a fully articulated theory of ethnic conflict yet more than an elaborate descriptive account with ex post plausible explanations. It is mindful of internal factions and shifting coalitions, of bystanders joining the conflict as issues accu- mulate, and of ordinary men recruited because of the security dilemma rather than because of hate. It is mindful of the original core issues in the conflict but supplements them with derivative issues that grow out of confrontation and peace making. In addition, it clarifies and explains the causes, courses, and outcomes of conflict. Peace making generates divisive issues that may become as contentious as the original core issues. After the fighting stops, political leaders continue divisive mobilization in elections and in politics against both internal rivals and their main ethnic adversaries. The polity, the economy, and the society change during armed conflict. In a television interview, Senator George Mitchell (2002) observed about his experience as a mediator in ethnic conflict that “There is a fixation and obsession with the past that hampers the ability to look at the future . . . unless people . . .look at the future, they are going to continue and relive the past with all the negatives that brings.” For a full-fledged peace process, all the parties in the peace process must shift from coercion to conciliation: not just the principal leaders and organizations, but the lesser factions and organizations13. For all these reasons, negotiations for peace are messy and complex. It should also be remembered, “How can a leader justify the sacrifice to the families of the fallen and to the public if he yields that territory or principle on the cheap”?

Contemporary armed conflict

Wallensteen and Axell, authors cited by Ledarach, have suggested a delineation of categories for assessing armed conflict by death tolls, locality, and issues. They provide three subset categories of armed conflict. The first is that of minor armed conflict, defined as a conflict between armed forces in which fewer than twenty-five people have died in a given year, and in which at least one of the parties was a state. Intermediate armed conflict is defined as a situation in which at least one thousand deaths have occurred over the course of the conflict, with at least twenty five deaths occurring in a particular year. War is reserved to describe a conflict in which at least one thousand deaths have occurred in a given year. Armed conflict comprises the total of the three categories. This categorization is widely used by other researchers, but there are some variations with some, such as the “Armed Conflict” reports, which define an armed conflict as a conflict that claims more than one thousand lives over its course.

During the Cold War Era, the dominant explanation for armed conflict was related to ideological considerations. Conflicts in the post-Cold War world are primarily internal and internationalized disputes in which the direct fighting is often akin to communal or intercommunal strife. These conflicts are characterized by deep-rooted and long-standing animosities that are reinforced by high levels of violence and direct experiences of atroci-

13 Ibid.

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ties. As a result, psychological and even cultural features often drive and sustain the conflict more than substantive issues14.Lederach says that at first, we must find innovative ways to transform an international culture that is based on poorly developed mechanisms for non- violent conflict transformation, that has a deep economic commitment to arms production, and that readily accepts the availability of weapons on the world market as legal and legiti- mate. Then, he says, the peacebuilding task must take into account the long-term horizon of protracted intermediate conflicts and wars, and develop a comprehensive, multifaceted strategy for ending violence and achieving and sustaining reconciliation. This calls for con- cepts and approaches that deal with the specific nature of contemporary armed conflict. In addition, as he says, we must acknowledge that war protracted armed conflict is a system, a system that can be transformed only by taking a comprehensive approach to the people who operate it and to the setting in which it is rooted. He concludes that we must also take up the challenge of how to prevent newly emerging minor armed conflicts from becoming full-scale wars. It is to these challenges that we should turn our attention.

Building peace a conceptual framework

In 1992, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali published an important docu- ment, titled An Agenda for Peace. In it, he proposed responsibilities and responses for the United Nations and the international community in dealing with contemporary conflicts. The proposal included four major areas of activity: preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post conflict peacebuilding. His framework suggests that at different times and in diverse contexts a variety of sequential response mechanisms and functions are needed to promote the resolution of conflict and sustenance of peace. The secretary- general qualifies the use of the term by connecting it exclusively to the postconflict support of peace accords and the rebuilding of war-torn societies. Lederach agrees fully that this is an increasingly critical phase, to which much attention must be paid. For him peacebuilding is understood as a comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships. The term thus involves a wide range of activities and functions that both precede and follow formal peace accords. Metaphorically, peace is seen not merely as a stage in time or a condition. It is a dynamic social construct. Such a concep- tualization requires a process of building, involving investment and materials, architectural design and coordination of labor, laying of a foundation, and detailed finish work, as well as continuing maintenance15. Conceptually, he understands a framework as providing the general parameters, the boundary outline that helps create meaning and focus; concepts are the more specific ideas and analytical elements that make up the framework. In other words, a framework helps situate things with a context and provides lenses through which we can look at them. The framework provides categories such as structure, process, relationship, resources, and coordination. The framework must address and engage the relational aspects of reconciliation as the central component of peacebuilding.

14 Lederach, 1997 15 Ibid.

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A conceptual framework for reconciliation First and foremost is the perhaps self-evident but oft-neglected notion that relation-

ship is the basis of both the conflict and its long-term solution. This was well articulated by Harold Saunders and Randa Slim, who put forward relationships as the focal point for sustained dialogue within protracted conflict settings16. Reconciliation must find ways to address the past without getting locked into a vicious cycle of mutual exclusiveness inher- ent in the past. People need opportunity and space to express to and with one another the trauma of loss and their grief at that loss, and the anger that accompanies the pain and the memory of injustices experienced. Acknowledgment is decisive in the reconciliation dy- namic. It is one thing to know; it is yet a very different social phenomenon to acknowledge. Acknowledgment through hearing one another’s stories validates experience and feelings and represents the first step toward restoration of the person and relationship. At the same time, reconciliation must envision the future in a way that enhances interdependence. In all contemporary internal conflicts, the futures of those who are fighting are ultimately and intimately linked and interdependent17. Opportunity must therefore be given for people to look forward and envision their shared future.

Lederach begins constructing his conceptual framework for building peace by assert- ing that genuine peacebuilding is more than the post-conflict support of a peace agreement. Rather, it “involves a wide range of activities and functions that both precede and follow formal peace accords, including “processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships. Relationships, Lederach asserts, are built through reconciliation, which balances four concepts: truth, mercy, justice, and peace (figure 1). Truth represents “the longing for acknowledgement of wrong and the validation of painful loss and experiences”. Mercy “articulates the need for acceptance, letting go, and a new beginning”. Justice “seeks vindication of individual and group rights while advocating for restitution and social restructuring”. Peace “underscores the need for interdependence, well-being, and security”. Reconciliation, in Lederach’s view, is both the process of balancing the four concepts and the social space where parties encounter each other and engage in the process18. The immediacy of hatred and prejudice, of racism and xenophobia, as primary factors and motivators of the conflict means that its transformation must be rooted in social-psychological and spiritual dimensions that traditionally have been seen as either irrelevant or outside the competence of international diplomacy.

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 To explore this idea in more detail, he offers an experience in Central America, which emerged from a theological

perspective when he was serving as an adviser to a religiously based conciliation team that mediated negotiation between the Sandinista government and the Yatama. At the opening of each village meeting, the Nicaraguan conciliators would read Psalm 85. In two short lines at the heart of the text (85: 10), the Spanish version reads (in translation): “Truth and mercy have met together; peace and justice have kissed.”

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Figure 1: The Place Called Reconciliation Source: Lederach, 1997

Lederach has found it helpful to think of leadership in the population affected by a conflict in terms of a pyramid (figure 2). In this instance, he says: We are using lenses to capture the overview of how an entire affected population in a setting of internal armed conflict is represented by leaders and other actors, as well as the roles they play in dealing with the situation. The pyramid permits us to lay out that leadership base in three major categories: top level, middle range, and the grassroots. The pinnacle, or top-level leadership, represents the fewest people, in some instances perhaps only a handful of key actors. The grassroots base of the pyramid encompasses the largest number of people, those who rep- resent the population at large. On the left-hand side of the pyramid are the types of leaders and the sectors from which they come at each level. On the right-hand side are the conflict transformation activities that the leaders at each level may undertake.

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Figure 2: Actors and Approaches to Peacebuilding. Source: Lederach, 1997

Approaches to peacebuilding To provide a structure for reconciliation, Lederach recommends coordinating the

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peacemaking efforts of a society’s top-level, middle-range, and grassroots leaders. The top-level political and military leaders generally negotiate cease-fires and peace accords. Middle-range leaders (e.g., leaders of academic, religious, business, professional, agricul- tural, and nongovernmental organizations who have ties to upper-level and grassroots lead- ers) conduct problem-solving workshops, train people in conflict-resolution skills, and lead peace commissions. Grassroots leaders (e.g., community and refugee-camp leaders, health officials, and members of indigenous nongovernmental organizations) achieve agreements to end fighting, implement policies made at higher levels, and set the stage for a move- ment toward peace. Two examples of peacebuilding efforts targeted at the grassroots level before formal peace and electoral structures took place in Mozambique, where initiatives emerged from both the Christian Council of Mozambique (CCM) and the United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF)19.

Concluding remarks: An Integrated framework

Lederach points to a crucial overlap between the structural and procedural lenses, as elements of a broad peacebuilding paradigm. “Structure” suggests the need to think comprehensively about the affected population and systemically about the issues. “Process” underscores the necessity of thinking creatively about the progression of conflict and the sustainability of its transformation by linking roles, functions, and activities in an integrated manner. He proposes an integrated approach to peace building, visualized in Figure 3. The vertical axis is taken from the Dugan nested paradigm20. The horizontal axis is the time frame model that links short-term crisis with longer-term perspective for change in the society21.

19 The CCM-initiated program “Preparing People for Peace,” was conceived as a way to open up and deal with conflict and peace issues in the Mozambique setting, with a specific focus on the provincial and district levels. The CCM program began with a national seminar in summer 1991 that brought together church representatives from all of the prov- inces; these representatives were then given the responsibility for implementing seminars at local levels. On average, each seminar involved between thirty and fifty participants, both pastors and laypersons, and lasted for two weeks. Over the course of sixteen months (toward the end of which the national peace accord was signed), more than seven hundred people participated in the seminars, several of which were held in refugee camps in neighboring Zimbabwe. The second example from Mozambique was the UNICEF project, “Circus of Peace.’’ Like a circus, the project was organized as a traveling show that wove drama and the arts into its explorations of the nature and challenges of war and conflict and the possibilities of reconciliation, including the skills of resolving conflict. The show not only captivated audiences but also served as a way to publicly grieve over the losses the country had suffered, to address concerns of the people, and to set the stage for changes and movement toward peace.

20 Concept, proposed by peace worker and theorist Maire Dugan, which views a specific incident of conflict as part of a relationship between the parties. Their relationship, in turn, is part of a subsystem to which the parties belong, which in turn is part of a larger social system. Dugan and Lederach recommend using middle-range leaders, acting at the relationship and subsystem levels, to connect short-term “issue concerns with long-term “systemic concerns”. In: Dugan, Maire A. “A Nested Theory of Conflict.” A Leadership Journal: Women in Leadership - Sharing the Vision 1 (July, 1996): 9-20.

21 Lederach adopts another nested paradigm to explain the types of activities required at each stage of the process. The first stage, crisis intervention, usually takes two to six months. The second stage, preparation and training, involves short-range planning that takes one to two years. The third stage, design of social change, is akin to dispute-resolution system design and takes five to ten years. The fourth stage, desired future, involves articulating and planning for social change over decades.

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Figure 3: An Integrated Framework for Peacebuilding

The two dimensions intersect at five points, each of which represents a distinct and too often discrete community of thought and action in the broader field of peacebuilding.

At one intersection of the two paradigms is a place for peacemakers to consider the past and determine the root causes of the conflict. At a second intersection, peacemakers resolve immediate issues through crisis management. At a third intersection, peacemakers absorb the lessons of the conflict and devise short-term strategies to prevent the conflict’s recurrence. At a fourth intersection, peacemakers envision the distant future and the social changes necessary to build peaceful relationships between the conflicting parties. At the fifth intersection, peacemakers design the strategies necessary to transform the existing conflict to the desired future. Integration begins with recognition that the middle range holds special potential for transformation, but that change will be needed at every level of human experience and endeavor. Specifically, the middle-range perspective suggests that we need to achieve integration in at least three strategic ways: 1) develop the capacity

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to think about the design of social change in time-units of decades, in order to link crisis management and long-term, future-oriented time frames; 2) understand crisis issues as connected to systemic roots and develop approaches that explicitly anchor issues within a set of relationships and subsystems; 3) recognize the integrative potential of middle-range leaders, who by their locus within the affected population may be able to cultivate relation- ships and pursue the design of social change at a subsystem level, thus helping to make the vertical and horizontal connections necessary to sustain a process of desired change. When we combine the elements in the integrated framework, we begin to establish an infrastructure for sustaining the dynamic transformation of conflict and the construction of peace. An infrastructure for peacebuilding is oriented toward supporting processes of social change generated by the need to move from stagnant cycles of violence toward a desired and shared vision of increased interdependence. Such an infrastructure must be rooted in the conflict setting and emerge creatively from the culture and context, but not be a slave of either. The purpose of the process structure is reconciliation that centers on the redefinition and restoration of broken relationships. To rebuild relationships, we must develop innovative ways of providing space within which the emotional and psychological aspects of the conflict can be addressed. Traditional approaches to diplomacy have tended to see reconciliation as peripheral, or worse, as irrelevant to the substance of building peace, when in fact reconciliation is the ingredient with the capacity to create the conditions for proactive sustainable change. Our challenge is to find strategic and practical approaches that help establish an infrastructure for sustainable transformation and that take seriously the immediate and deep rooted needs of divided societies. Peacebuilding, Lederach asserts, requires two types of resources: socioeconomic and sociocultural. As to Lederach’s concept of socioeconomic resources, he recommends that peacemakers encourage funding agencies to develop categories of funding related to peacebuilding, lobby governments and other agencies to raise and allocate funds for defraying the social and material costs of weapons use, and encourage administrators of peacebuilding funds to allocate those funds to the types of activities that are most cost-effective. As to sociocultural resources, Lederach deems it essential to build a “peace constituency” within the conflict setting by using the cultural resources available in the setting. Resources are most effective when they are coordinated. To achieve coordination, Lederach recommends that peacebuilders develop a “peace inven- tory (i.e., a list of the people and organizations performing various types of peacemaking activities), improve communications between top-level and mid-level leaders, engage in conferences among donors of peacebuilding resources, create broad-based resource groups that participate in the design of the peace process, and coordinate the work of “internal peacemakers (i.e., those working within the conflict area) with the work of “external peace- makers (i.e., those working outside the conflict area). Because the integrated peacebuilding framework requires numerous and specific capacities (e.g., violence prediction, dispute system design, cultural resource analysis, and strategic social futures design), Lederach foresees that many people will require training to acquire those capacities. He asserts that we are not impaired by a lack of resources, if we choose to invest wisely and practically in peace. We are limited only by how far we are willing to cast our vision. We must not

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despair at the depth and breadth of the challenge, but rather rise to meet it. Reconciliation is possible. The house of peace can be built.

Conclusion and recommendations

This paper has offered an overview of concepts and theories related to peacebuild- ing, which come by a scholar and a practitioner side. However, it is important to mention that this is not an exhaustive overview. The notion of peacebuilding remains one that is notoriously difficult to pin down in terms of not only meaning but also differentiation from other similar and linked terms such as conflict prevention and post conflict stabilization. The UN activities that support what are peacebuilding activities are multi-faceted and might include disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants (DDR); anti-mine actions; security sector reform and other rule-of law related activities; the protection and promotion of human rights; the electoral assistance and support to the restoration and ex- tension of (legitimate) state authority. Unsurprisingly, the complexity in terms of both the conceptual understanding of peace building and its practical implementation is mirrored in the EU context. The distinctiveness of the EU’s approach lies in the potential nascent or realized to respond to variety of challenges. Conceptually peacebuilding in the EU context includes both the conflict prevention role as well as the ability to immediately to respond to conflict and crises. The “distinctive” EU approach is though fully compatible with the UN’s peacebuilding activities and on several occasions, such as the ESDP military operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003 or the contemporary rule of law mission in Kosovo has demonstrated this in a particular manner22. The concept of peacebuilding is itself slowly evolving and being shaped within the EU institutions and the EU members. The EU has a formidable potential to link together all of the various facets of its influence, ranging from its trade, development and assistance tools, to the “harder” aspects of its profile being developed through ESDP. The attainment of this potential will depend very much upon the internal dynamics of the EU institutions but in particular upon the political will of the Member States to support the EU’s peacebuilding efforts. In fact the challenge goes beyond the EU to include efforts of important partners notably the UN, to the same end23.

In addition, I would I would like to refer to the goal of my paper explicitly stated at the beginning of the paper. Its main purpose has been to provide not only a general introduction to the topic but also context for future analyses of specific aspects of peace- building and point out the importance of the reconciliation in the process of establishing a sustainable peace Also, to give the construct to create specific cases like the case of post conflict Macedonia as stated in my general hypothesis - by trying to answer the question as to whether the country is moving into a direction of a divided society and what lies behind the lingering post - Ohrid discontent. I sincerely hope this paper has set the stage for it. Hopefully, analysis made on justice, policing, partition, power-sharing, and external media- tion in a post conflict country could offer a treasure trove of research hypotheses that could

22 Duke and Courtier, 2009 23 Ibid.

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fill volumes of future books. Finally, study of deeply divided societies24 or societies which have the potential to become divided is valuable both to enriching the understanding of democratic models of governance and to informing institutional arrangements to facilitate peace and reconciliation.

REFERENCES:

1. Anthony, Oberschall, „Conflict and Peace Building in Divided Societies- Responses to ethnic vio- lence”, Routledge, 2007

2. Biggar, Nigel, „Press Burying the past: making peace and doing justice after civil conflict”, George- town University Press, 2003

3. Dugan, Maire A. “A Nested Theory of Conflict.” A Leadership Journal: Women in Leadership - Sharing the Vision 1 (July, 1996): 9-20

4. Lederach, John, Paul „Building peace: sustainalble reconciliation in divided societies”, USIP, 1997 5. Ljubomir, D., Frchkovski, „Negotiation in Identity Conflicts”, Templum, Skopje, 2007 6. Webster’sThird New International Dictionary, 1981 7. Simon Duke and Aurelie Coultier,” EU Concepts, Players and Instruments”, Working paper No.33-

December 2009

8. Adrian Guelke , “Politics in deeply divided societies” , Polity Press, 2012.

24 A “deeply divided society,” as defined by Adrian Guelke, is one where violence or the threat of violence keeps it divided. What distinguishes deeply divided societies from fragmented ones is their inability to agree on a common process for decision-making, making peace and reconciliation difficult, if not impossible to achieve (Guelke,2012)

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