Title: Conflict Resolution in South Asia—Parallels and Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process
Abstract: Conflict Resolution in South Asia—Parallels and Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process John Doyle Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction, Dublin City University The Northern Ireland case is commonly discussed internationally as a successful peace process, notwithstanding the many challenges the administration in Northern Ireland has faced since the signing of the 1998 peace agreement. Officials in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Northern Ireland Office and most Irish academics writing on the conflict can testify to the regularity of visiting delegations of academics and political actors from other conflict zones who come to look at the Irish case, just as most of those involved in seeking to secure peace in Northern Ireland travelled to South Africa in the mid 1990s. Delegations, experts, individual political groups and mediators involved in peace processes from Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Liberia, Pakistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Timor Leste, Colombia, Israel and Palestine, to name just some high-profile conflicts, have collectively spent considerable time in Ireland over the past 20 years. Yet there remains considerable scepticism as to which, if any, aspects of the Northern Ireland case can be useful in other circumstances, where the conflict and context is very different. The following set of papers on South Asia are part of an attempt to look at one region seeking to resolve conflict. They are primarily focused on the politics and needs of that region—but the analysis they present was done in Ireland, with participants and an audience of Irish experts who came together to tease out what can usefully be compared with the Northern Ireland case and what the barriers are to doing that well.1 There are Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 26 (2015), 5–13. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3318/ISIA.2015.26.19 Author’s e-mail: [email protected] 1 Most of the papers which follow developed out of a series of workshops held by the Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction in Dublin City University, involving academics from South Asia and Europe. few direct references to Ireland in these papers; that was not the purpose of publishing them. Rather, the intention was to bring together a set of experts on one region—focusing on what they see as crucial barriers to progress in that particular region’s conflicts—to advance the debate on what aspects of the Northern Ireland case might be relevant to their analysis, and how a rigorous comparison might be carried out that speaks to international audiences. South Asia is a region with many security challenges and a legacy of enduring and protracted conflict. The Economist headline of 2011, referring to the Line of Control between India and Pakistan through Kashmir as ‘The world’s most dangerous border’,2 is a not untypical reflection of a view that an Indo–Pakistan nuclear conflict is the greatest nuclear threat in the contemporary world. In addition to that, Afghanistan remains the conflict in the region with the greatest annual death toll, and with the most pessimistic assessments of the potential for resolution, and there are other, lesser known conflicts, such as those involving Maoist insurgents in many parts of India, that are significant and long-running conflicts in their own right. The following papers address many of these conflicts, but even in a larger than normal volume of Irish Studies in International Affairs, it is not practical to systematically cover the entire region. The internal conflicts in Pakistan, the diverse conflicts in India’s northeast , the end of the Tamil war in Sri Lanka and on-going low-level conflict in Bangladesh are obvious cases not covered here. The papers presented do, however, give an insight into many of the key internal and cross-border conflicts of the region, setting each in an international context. Afghanistan and Kashmir are probably the two conflicts with the highest international profile, however it is the Maoist insurgency that the previous prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, called the country’s ‘greatest security challenge’.3 The case of Punjab has been included as its historic influence in India has been very significant, and the common characterisation of the approach...
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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