After Civil War - (National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century) by Bill Kissane (Hardcover)

About the Book

After Civil War compares the postconflict reconstruction projects of Bosnia, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, and Turkey to explore how former combatants and their supporters learn to coexist as one nation in the aftermath of ethnopolitical or ideological violence.

Book Synopsis

Civil war inevitably causes shifts in state boundaries, demographics, systems of rule, and the bases of legitimate authority--many of the markers of national identity. Yet a shared sense of nationhood is as important to political reconciliation as the reconstruction of state institutions and economic security. After Civil War compares reconstruction projects in Bosnia, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, and Turkey in order to explore how former combatants and their supporters learn to coexist as one nation in the aftermath of ethnopolitical or ideological violence.

After Civil War synthesizes research on civil wars, reconstruction, and nationalism to show how national identity is reconstructed over time in different cultural and socioeconomic contexts, in strong nation-states as well as those with a high level of international intervention. Chapters written by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists examine the relationships between reconstruction and reconciliation, the development of new party systems after war, and how globalization affects the processes of peacebuilding. After Civil War thus provides a comprehensive, comparative perspective to a wide span of recent political history, showing postconflict articulations of national identity can emerge in the long run within conducive institutional contexts.

Contributors: Risto Alapuro, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Chares Demetriou, James Hughes, Joost Jongerden, Bill Kissane, Denisa Kostovicova, Michael Richards, Ruth Seifert, Riki van Boeschoten.

Review Quotes

"This important book may well be the first serious comparative study of how European societies reconstruct national identities after civil conflict. The cases, from Ireland and Finland early in the twentieth century to the 1998 peace agreement in Northern Ireland, are varied in their approaches but all interesting and enlightening. The contributors find that in most cases the political system was rebuilt first, while societal reconciliation took many decades-an important lesson for peace processors everywhere."-- "Stuart Kaufman, University of Delaware"

About the Author

Bill Kissane is Associate Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics and author of several books, including The Politics of the Irish Civil War.