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This chapter examines the delicate balance achieved by apex courts in new democracies when dealing with impunity for rights violations during times of transitional justice. While international law has clearly rejected amnesties for past rights violations, domestic politics sometimes incorporate amnesties as part of larger peace settlements. This puts courts in the difficult situation of balancing the competing demands of law and politics. Courts have achieved equipoise in this situation by adopting substantive interpretations and procedural approaches that use international law’s rights-based language but without implementing international law’s restrictions on amnesties. In many cases, courts do this without acknowledging the necessarily pragmatic nature of their decisions. In fact, oftentimes courts find ways of avoiding having to make any substantive decision, effectively removing themselves from a dispute that could call into question their adherence to international legal norms that transcend politics. In doing so, they empower political actors to continue down the road toward negotiated peace settlements, while at the same time protecting the courts’ legitimacy as institutions uniquely situated to protect international human rights norms – including those they have effectively deemphasized in the process.

My framework is based upon a grounded analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) of a review of the existing social science and education literature regarding globalization and peace from approximately 1960 to the present. My review consisted of identifying emergent themes in the literature and from these identifying conceptual categories and the relationships among them that could explain some of the ways in which globalization, peace, and educational processes are linked. I approached the literature as a “cache of documents” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), that is, as bodies of literature reflecting certain sensibilities regarding globalization and peace. My framework is based upon an analysis of how these sensibilities have influenced the reproduction of inequalities through the education sector as a socialization and policy context.

Civil society in Sri Lanka has, to a large extent, been shaped by British colonial rule and the establishment of the modern, democratic state in the first half of the 20th century. In pre-colonial times, grass roots communities organised around the need for collective work in temples and for irrigation. A notion of pre-colonial cooperation and harmony and an ideal traditional Buddhist society, which was lost due to colonialism and modernisation and should be revived, today forms part of the Sinhalese nationalist discourse and of the mobilisation rationale of the large community development organisation Sarvodaya (see Gombrich & Obeysekere, 1988; Brow, 1990).

Purpose – To answer two related questions, namely, why women in general are excluded from peace-building processes and why women in Israel are excluded from peace-building processes and have to create their own organizations?

Methodology/approach – This is narrative prospective research paper. First, the research focuses on international gender theories regarding participation of women in peace-building processes, and then on the particular situation of women in Israel and their need to form peace movements and organizations of their own.

Findings – The research revealed that Israeli women's absence from the official negotiations with the Palestinians as well as women's exclusion from other peace-building processes is part of a global phenomenon. Given the fact that women have been missing from the Israel's official negotiations with the Palestinians since 1987 when the first Intifada began, and their plight is not addressed, women need to create their own peace movements and organizations for voicing their unique value for the benefit of society at large.

Research limitations – An update of the research should be conducted every two years to check changes in findings.

Value of the paper – The chapter highlights the significance of women's inclusion in peace building. It describes women's exclusion from the peace process in Israel although they have been extremely active and were recognized internationally and stresses the need for a gendered society to end the Palestinian–Israel conflict.

This chapter will look at how peace-entrepreneurs are crucial in conflict and post-conflict environments to address peace challenges, and how the use of ITC can scale up the outputs of peace-oriented business in a particular region. Indeed, when technology is used effectively it can amplify voices for peace and empower local communities and entrepreneurs looking for alternatives to violence through a market-oriented business approach. The chapter will also argue that a peace-driven local business network can be as powerful as the post-conflict international aid typically provided by international donors. The chapter will focus in particular on an analysis of the PeaceStartup initiative developed in Colombia. This initiative is aimed at promoting peace-entrepreneurs through a co-innovation process among relevant actors based on a specific methodology grounded in traditional Silicon Valley start-up weekends.

The gendered consequences of war are often not fully realized, as women tend to carry the heavier burdens in post-conflict situations, yet at the same time can be left out of the formal peace process. Women can be part of the peace process informally through economic empowerment and sustainability. As most post-conflict situations are occurring in the developing world, one of the major issues in the peace process is the notion of a rescue narrative. Organizations from the developed world approach peacebuilding as a project that often disenfranchises and disempowers the people they are trying to help. Therefore, women must be empowered to contribute to their economic situations rather than becoming dependent on the help of outsiders. This amplifies the role of the follower by giving her the tools to be part of the solution and become self-sustainable.

This chapter argues for the role of social enterprise in building sustainable peace by giving women agency and power in their communities. It will look at these phenomena through the lens of a non-governmental organization, 31 Bits, that offers a valuable case study in the post-conflict Northern Uganda town of Gulu where they employ 100 plus women in a five-year program that equips them to become fully self-sustainable through the creation of jewelry handmade from recycled paper. Their holistic approach moves beyond the nonprofit model of charity and survival for giving their beneficiaries the chance to thrive. In this way, it is not relief or rescue work but rather informal sustainable peace development. When women are economically empowered, their communities are closer to reaching gender equality and achieving positive peace.

The main thesis of the chapter is to introduce a new idea to the field of peace negotiations, which will require the development of a new model of negotiations to enforce peace. The existing models of peace negotiations highlight the existence of a positive peace dividend to parties involved in conflicts and peace negotiation. They, hence, usually highlight a gradual and dynamic adjustment, or movement, away from a conflict-ridden outcome towards a peaceful outcome that offers a positive peace dividend to all relevant stakeholders. In comparison with the status quo, peace brings additional economic returns and peace therefore offers a win–win situation. Despite the fact that a win–win situation does not ensure the enforcement of peace, as agents can easily get locked into what is commonly known as the prisoners' dilemma – yet the possibility of Pareto improvement makes negotiations for peace somewhat artificial. At least in the short run all agents involved in active conflicts are apprehensive of peace as they expect immediate (expected) returns from making peace can outweigh the expected returns from conflicts. An important work that sidesteps the win–win situation of peace dividends is by Isard and Azis (1999) who introduced the possibility of an immediate loss of economic returns from the peace process in their conflict management procedure (CMP). However, in the existing work on CMP, the long-run returns from peace outweigh that from conflicts. One therefore presumes that peace brings economic benefits to all. The existing CMPs therefore assume away any possibility of lower economic returns from peace. There are some important models in which peace negotiations are also modelled as a zero-sum game in which the gain of a party represents a loss to others, which is known as win–lose negotiations. In this work we introduce the possibility of bargaining and negotiations against the backdrop of potential immediate losses while peace is favoured simply for its intrinsic value and not for pecuniary returns. In the real world, there is evidence to believe that agents involved in conflicts are painfully aware of two things: first, the decision-making agents who choose between conflicts vis-à-vis peace are the leaders who get rarely affected by economic returns from conflicts or peace. It is usually the foot soldiers who bear the brunt of costly conflicts and can benefit from peace. Secondly, most people value peace for the sake of it as peace has an intrinsic value that ensures the protection of rights and their lives and protection from violence. Thus, peace is a collective good that provides little extra economic returns to actual decision-makers who choose between courses of conflicts or peace.

To outline strategies for balancing a critical approach to sport for development and peace (SDP) interventions with approaches that highlight the potentially positive outcomes of SDP. Two examples of attempts to balance these approaches are highlighted. One is a critical analysis of responses to sport-related environmental problems. The other is a study of how a sport-related reconciliation event led by celebrity athletes was successfully organized.

In the first part of the chapter, the complexity of the SDP concept (and the terms sport, peace, and development) is discussed along with the challenges of negotiating critical and more optimistic stances on SDP. In the second part, two approaches to navigating between “extremely critical” and “unwaveringly optimistic” stances on SDP are outlined through two case studies.

The two case studies are described along with preliminary findings from studies that were conducted. Each case study is accompanied by a discussion of how the author “middle-walked” between “extremely critical” and “unwaveringly optimistic” positions on SDP. A focus in this section is on how theory, methods, and strategies for reporting findings were accounted for in the process of balancing these distinct positions.

The difficulties attempting to balance critical and optimistic positions are discussed. The difficulties connecting critical analysis with practical suggestions for improving SDP-related work were also outlined.