Umeå University's logo

The act of genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces on 11 July 1995 in Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia Herzegovina left behind dozens of mass-graves with the bodies of more than 8000 Bošnjak boys and men. Since the fragile peace brought to Bosnia by the Dayton Peace Agreement, the fate of Srebrenica has been one of the main issues standing in the way of any meaningful reconciliation process between the Bosnian ethnic groups. Over the past 20 years, the Serb side has barely acknowledged any past wrongdoing at Srebrenica, while the Bošnjaks increasingly view the site as their symbolic place of mourning and remembering, making it central to the Bošnjak nation-building process. The conflicting views of the different groups were brought into the open with the building of the Potočari Memorial Center outside Srebrenica. The local Serb political elites attempted to stop the construction of the site, so that the Office of the High Representative of the International Community to Bosnia Herzegovina (the OHR) had to override local political decisions. Since then, the Potočari Memorial Center and the burial site have been a focus of Bosnian political performance at least once a year: at the annual burial ceremonies held every 11th of July, on the day of the fall of Srebrenica.

For decades, peace and conflict studies have devoted more attention to conflict than to peace, and despiteits centrality, peace itself has been under-conceptualized. In this paper, we propose a theoretical frameworkand methodologies to make peace beyond the absence of war researchable. The framework is designed to capture varieties of peace between and beyond dichotomous conceptions of positive versus negative peace, or successful versus failed peace processes. To capture the complexity of peace in its empirical diversity, our framework approaches peace in three different ways: as a situation or condition in a particular locality; as a web of relationships; and as ideas or discourses about what peace is or should be. These approaches provide different avenues for researching peace, and taken together they provide a fuller picture of what peace is, how it is manifested, experienced, and understood. We argue that this framework provides a way forward in advancing conceptual understandings and empirical analyses of peace that can facilitate systematic, comparative, qualitative analyses while at the same time accounting for the complex, multifaceted nature of peace.

The Varieties of Peace research program aims to analyze long-term effects of peace processes in conflicts that ended in the 1990s. The central research questions are: What characterizes peace after the peace processes initiated in the 1990s and how does it vary? How can this variation be described and explained? Peace processes have been studied using short time perspectives, usually in "lessons-learned" evaluations five years after conflict termination, and usually with theories of conflict as a starting point. The Varieties of Peace research program is an ambitious initiative, which starts from a theoretical understanding of peace, its quality and character, and views peace and peace processes as dynamic and transformative. It will investigate and evaluate different types of peace processes from a comparative perspective and 25–30 years after they started, with the ambition of producing generalizable knowledge about peace, what it is and how it can be achieved. As a starting point, the program studies explanatory factors in five areas: 1) the actions, capacity and resilience of civil society, 2) the interests and strategies of the elites, 3) the aims and character of the agreements, 4) the societies' institutions and resilience, and 5) international involvement. These issues will be studies in at least ten projects, with the ambition to capture and explain variation, internal dynamics and ultimately the results and effects of peace processes, studied over a longer period of time. The Varieties of Peace program is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond: the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017-2024. For more info, please visit our webpage at www.varietiesofpeace.net.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse factors influencing perceptions of preparedness in the response to terrorist attacks of operational personnel in Swedish emergency organizations. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected using a questionnaire distributed to operational personnel from the police, rescue and ambulance services in eight Swedish counties; 864 responses were received and analysed. Findings: Three aspects of the perception of preparedness for terrorist attacks among Swedish emergency responders were studied: willingness to respond; level of confidence with tasks; and estimated management capability. Factors which positively influenced these perceptions were male sex, training in first aid and dealing with mass casualty incidents, terrorism-related management training (MT), table-top simulations, participation in functional exercises, and access to personal protective equipment (PPE); work experience was inversely related. Occupation in police or rescue services was positively associated with willingness to respond whereas occupation within the emergency medical services was positively associated with estimated management capability. Practical implications: These findings show that terrorism-related MT and access to PPE increase the perceptions of preparedness for terrorism among the emergency services, aiding judgements about investments in preparedness by crisis management planners. Originality/value: Limited research in disaster management and hazard preparedness has been conducted in a European context, especially regarding terrorism. Little is known about aspects of preparedness for terrorism in Sweden, particularly from the perspective of the emergency responders.

The reconstruction of society after conflict is complex and multifaceted. This book investigates this theme as it relates to cultural heritage through a number of case studies relating to European wars since 1864. The case studies show in detail how buildings, landscapes, and monuments become important agents in post-conflict reconstruction, as well as how their meanings change and how they become sites of competition over historical narratives and claims. Looking at iconic and lesser-known sites, this book connects broad theoretical discussions of reconstruction and memorialisation to specific physical places, and in the process it traces shifts in their meanings over time. This book identifies common threads and investigates their wider implications. It explores the relationship between cultural heritage and international conflict, paying close attention to the long aftermaths of acts of destruction and reconstruction and making important contributions through the use of new empirical evidence and critical theory.

In the 1990s, a number of protracted armed conflicts were finally ended. This period can be described as a paradigmatic shift with regards to how armed conflicts are brought to an end. When the logic of the Cold War no longer hindered the United Nations (UN) to intervene, the number of UN peace operations rose dramatically and became more comprehensive. In addition, conflicts increasingly ended through negotiated settlements rather than military victory. The peace processes of the 1990s gave rise to great optimism that negotiations and peacebuilding efforts, often with considerable international involvement, would bring sustainable peace to war-affected countries. The outcomes of these peace processes, however, appears to be far from unanimously positive. Today, 20 years after the war endings of the 1990s, it is therefore imperative to critically analyze and evaluate these peace processes and their long-term results. What is the situation like today in countries where conflicts ended in the 1990s? What has become of the peace? In this paper, the long-term outcomes of peace processes that took place in the 1990s are evaluated through brief analyses of a number of cases,demonstrating that the nature and quality of peace today show great diversity. The paper also includes a conceptualization of the "peace triangle" aimed at distinguishing between different forms of peace, as well as a study of the relationship between peacebuilding and democracy in UN peace operations in the 1990s, concluding that outcomes with regards to democratic development in the intervened countries are generally poor.