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Political leaders often deploy religious symbols and language to legitimate their war polices while opponents use it to forestall or control war. We examine George W. Bush's religious discourse in the post-9/11 and Iraq War era and find that it was marked by binary thinking and the demonizing of a largely religious enemy. Our analysis of the statements of 15 US peace movement organizations after 9/11 further reveals that the US peace movement had three primary responses to Bush's religiously based discourse in support of war.

First, they directly challenged his binaries and his demonizing of a broadly defined, religious enemy. Second, they harnessed the President's religious discourse to turn it against him and his policies. Third, they constructed oppositional knowledge by providing corrective information about Islam.

By examining the movement's discourses over a 15-year period that spans five major conflict periods, our analysis also shows a close relationship between the peace movement's use of religious discourse and its identity-based talk. In addition, we found a close relationship between the movement's religious discourses and its promotion of more costly forms of politics, i.e., extrainstitutional, protest-based politics. Thus, we also argue that the US peace movement's religious discourses during major conflict periods are both strategic and driven by individual agency, are not only tactical but also expressive, and are intended to have both outward and inward effects.

Studies of consensus-based groups have historically focused on decision making processes as the defining attribute of a collective structure. Such organizations are typically analyzed as critical alternatives to capitalist bureaucratic hierarchies. This study of a small business, collectively owned and operated by women, expands the understanding of collective process by analyzing the relationship between democratic participation and the nature of the organization as socially constructed through the claimsmaking activities of its members. Tensions arising between the normative value of claims-making, the empowerment of women, running a sustainable business, and the use of consensus decision making are raised with examples from the business.

The research articles in this volume were initially presented at a conference, entitled “Cutting Edge Theories and Recent Developments in Conflict Resolution,” which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Presenters were encouraged to submit their papers for consideration, and following a rigorous peer review and revision process, nine articles were accepted. The volume explores some of the major themes of conflict analysis, including how powerful dominant discourses can both soothe and exacerbate conflict, the roles of civic organizations in promoting peace and incubating democratic principles, the ways in which different forms of dialogue are used to heal historically dysfunctional intergroup relations, and the importance of a deeply institutional, structural understanding of ethnocentrism and racism. The authors conducted their research in several different countries – the US, Canada, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland – and used a wide range of analytical techniques including in-depth interviews, surveys, and document analysis. What holds them together is the rigorous tie they make between theory and empirical data. Some authors have built conflict theory inductively, based on their own research and/or secondary sources, while others have tested existing models with empirical data. These articles collectively make a solid contribution to theoretical development in the conflict analysis field.