This edited volume brings together a series of contributions exploring the socio-cultural and psychological representation of peace and conflict. It ventures into areas of the humanities and social sciences not typically foregrounded in Peace Studies, such psychology, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, history, and geography.

Sacred Violence and Religious Violence examines the place that ideology or political religion plays in legitimizing violence to bring about a purer world. In particular, the book examines Islamism and the western secular, liberal democratic responses to it.

This interdisciplinary study provides an original account of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to show how, why and with what consequences, twenty-first century wars became seen as policing wars.
Holmqvist starts from the assumption that wars always reflect the societies that wage them and combines the analysis of western strategic thinking with a philosophical examination of the core ideas that structure the contemporary liberal imagination. She argues that the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were characterised by a widespread understanding of war as 'policing' - that...

Through a rigorous critique of the dominant narrative of the Rwandan genocide, Collins provides an alternative argument to the debate situating the killings within a historically-specific context and drawing out a dynamic interplay between national and international actors.

Why are some societies more violent than others? This book uses a novel approach to this dilemma by studying how violence breeds more violence in societies with experience of civil war. It unpacks the relationships between political violence, social violence and economic violence and shows how civil war creates the conditions in which violence with diverse aims, such as vigilantism, rebellion, gang violence and violent xenophobia can co-exist and flourish. It also examines the cultural impact of war and argues that a culture of violence can explain the high levels of violence which are...

Considering an under-researched dimension of political violence, this interdisciplinary collection provides an extensive examination of terrorist victimisation. It explores how individual and public experiences of victimisation are constructed and how they are shaped by existing dynamics of violence.

The increased targeting of civilians by militants raises serious and profound questions for policy-makers. Examining conflict in Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, this book focuses on ethno-nationalist militant groups and formulates a model to constrain violence against civilians.

How does ideology in some states radicalise to such an extent as to become genocidal? Can the causes of radicalisation be seen as internal or external? Examining the ideological evolution in the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and during the break up of Yugoslavia, Elisabeth Hope Murray seeks to answer these questions in this comparative work.

This study investigates the role of youth in peacebuilding, and addresses the failure of states and existing research to recognise youths as political actors, which can result in their contribution to peacebuilding being ignored.

Holmqvist presents an original account of the relationship between war and policing in the twenty first century. This interdisciplinary study of contemporary Western strategic thinking reveals how, why, and with what consequences, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became seen as policing wars.