Mobilizing for Peace: Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine

Peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs) are civil society organizations dedicated to resolving protracted conflicts. Teams of local researchers coordinated by an international advisory board, investigate the characteristics, roles, similarities, and differences of P/CROs in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine in the last third of the twentieth century. Comparative research of this sort throws up definitional, conceptual, and methodological difficulties. A historical overview of the three conflicts reveals shared features: disputes over land; forced settlements; ethnonational divisions; and the intersection of class and race. In South Africa, P/CROs engaged in antimilitarization activities, mediation, promoting contact between white and black communities, encouraging dialog between elites, and research, and with other antiapartheid nongovernmental organizations and the mass‐based resistance movements formed a “multiorganizational field.” In Israel, P/CRO activities included consciousness raising and protest, dialog promotion, some professional service provision, and the articulation of propeace arguments, but received little credit for any contributions they made to the peace process. Palestinian P/CROs were few and weakly developed as a result of Palestine's sociopolitical culture, although they performed human rights advocacy, international diplomacy, and domestic consciousness raising. Northern Ireland's voluntary sector was large, and included many P/CROs, which tended to focus on the symptoms of the conflict rather than the cause, and had little impact on the peace process beyond bringing an “inclusivist” philosophy to the political arena, fostering political debate, and providing some progressive leadership. Across the three regions, some P/CRO similarities emerged: foreign funding was crucial; charismatic leadership was important; almost all P/CROs became more professional and formal over time; and most P/CROs employed the same sorts of tactics, with some variation according to political context, but framed their conflicts differently. In general, it seems P/CRO impact was minimal: they played no direct role in the resolution of their respective conflicts but made indirect contributions.