Radical Peace?: The PEACE Programmes and Transformative Peace-Building Strategies after 1994

Abstract

There is a marked tendency to refer to Northern Ireland’s ‘peace process’. This term is contestable for several reasons. First, as I shall argue in the following chapters, the assumption that the processes used to create and implement peace interventions are inherently peaceful – or rather, non-violent – is questionable. Secondly, there is rarely a single peace process; the formal agreements and negotiations that lead to constitution-based peace agreements are in fact frameworks upon which a range of other processes are interlaced. It is these processes – in this case, of democratization, governance, development and securitization – through which peace interventions are ’delivered’ and, in some cases, in which peace is believed to consist.