This article investigates the critical and often overlooked role of families of missing persons in peacebuilding when the hostilities of armed conflict cease. The unresolved fate of missing persons creates ambiguous loss, a state of chronic psychological and social uncertainty that structurally impedes communal recovery and undermines the fragile foundations of peace. While the issue of missing persons is typically framed as a humanitarian and legal challenge, this study argues that families of the missing are uniquely positioned to act as transformative peacebuilding agents.

Drawing on primary data collected across three distinct settings – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Nepal – the study employs a qualitative, comparative case study methodology. It analyzes how families of the missing, driven by the imperative of establishing the fate of their loved ones, actively engage across conflict divides and contribute to lasting social and political transformation.

Findings demonstrate that the search for the missing necessitates engagement with individuals and groups on the opposing side, effectively forcing the creation of cross-community relationships. Families of the missing successfully overcome deep-seated suspicion, hostility and sometimes political pressure from their own communities to forge solidarity, based on shared experience of loss, with other families. This process enables relational reciprocity and the cognitive reframing of former enemies, leading to the humanization of the “other”. These encounters produce profound personal and interpersonal transformation, which in turn can catalyze the challenging of antagonistic community-level narratives and support broader societal reconciliation.

Families of the missing leverage their legitimacy and humanitarian framing of the issue to become powerful agents of structural change. They challenge exclusive, one-sided interpretations of conflict, advocate for a universal and broad vision of justice, and demand truth-telling and accountability. By acknowledging victimhood on all sides and articulating an understanding of peace based on mutual recognition of suffering, families help to heal social divisions and address the root causes of conflict. Through their focus on truth-seeking and cross-community relationship-building, families of the missing can make an essential contribution to the prevention of renewed conflict and the establishing of a foundation for sustainable peace.

Why do governments engage in public negotiations with criminal groups, which can be politically costly? I argue that three conditions are necessary for elected authorities to support public negotiations. First, elected authorities support negotiations when the relative conditions of criminal power make it easier to portray negotiations as superior to repression (repression failure frame) or as means to support disaffected youth (marginalisation frame). Second, dialogue brokers – that is, key individuals within government and civil society with know-how about criminal groups – shape government support by inserting concrete negotiation proposals into these frames. Third, electoral security for executive authorities incentivises them to support negotiations. I substantiate this argument by comparing cases in cities with contrasting state capacity and criminal sophistication, Belize City and Medellín.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) have important roles to play in building trust in post-conflict societies. This research examined how 25 CSO peacebuilders use communication to build trust in Northern Ireland. Our findings suggest that peacebuilders work across different levels of society as trust intermediaries. Communication is central to CSO peacebuilders’ practice in engendering trust and in demonstrating their trustworthiness as individuals, inter-group facilitators and organizational representatives. Synthesized from our data, a communication toolkit from ‘low level’ communication intervention to ‘high level’ persuasion explains the strategies that CSO peacebuilders employ to mitigate distrust and nurture trust as they work towards peace in Northern Ireland. We propose this toolkit might be malleable to trust building in other conflict-affected contexts.

Ethics are commonly invoked to mitigate the adverse effects of digitalization on international practices such as diplomacy, humanitarianism, or peacebuilding. However, their productive role in shaping global politics has received little attention. This article elucidates how policy and guidance documents containing ‘PeaceTech’ ethics discursively construct normative vectors, i.e., moral claims that frame risks, suggest responses, and attribute responsibilities. We identify five major tendencies through which this takes place, namely the internationalizing, outsourcing, delegating, localizing, and individualizing of PeaceTech-related risks. These vectors produce a cascade of responsibility that reaches from the international to the local, from the public to the private sector and civil society, and from organizations to end users. Agents placed higher in the cascade mainly deal with abstract and systemic risks, while agents placed lower are responsible for dealing with tangible and personal risks. Yet the latter often have the least resources to respond to these risks, and have to weigh up whether to accept them and maintain critical data collection and analysis functions, or to reduce these risks while potentially jeopardizing PeaceTech. We describe how this can amount to what we call ‘decentred dereliction’, i.e., the abandonment of goals in and through digital peacebuilding.

The essay examines the lessons from the international intervention in Afghanistan, highlighting the failures of externally imposed state building, including neglect of local governance structures and prioritizing donor interests over Afghan ownership. The international peace- and state-building intervention in Afghanistan, which spanned two decades, culminated in the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, leading to the Taliban’s swift resurgence. This event has sparked a critical examination of the strategies employed by NATO and allied nations during their engagement in Afghanistan. This essay aims to distill seven key lessons from this intervention, emphasizing the need for future peacebuilders to adapt their approaches to better align with local contexts and realities. The analysis highlights the failures of liberal peacebuilding, the importance of local ownership, the necessity of effective and legitimate institutions, and the detrimental impact of corruption. Furthermore, it underscores the significance of coherence among international actors and the need for a nuanced understanding of regional dynamics. By reflecting on these lessons, the essay seeks to provide actionable insights for future international interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states.

Councils of National Minorities (NMCs), connected with the concept of non-territorial autonomy, have been recognized in research as a safeguard of minority rights, offering potential solutions to ethnic tensions. NMCs could be important actors in countries such as Serbia where tensions over the Kosovo issue are still present. Despite various studies on NMCs in Serbia, the specific role of women in these councils and their contribution to peace-making has not been a primary focus. This 2024 research in Serbia examines the involvement of women from NMCs in challenging male/state-centric discourses on women as peacemakers through inductive thematic analysis of interviews with female NMCs’ representatives. The focus of the analysis is on intersections of nation and gender, the impact of women in NMCs on reducing tensions and fostering peace, and the gendered nature of these processes. This study contributes to understanding the role of women from NMCs in peacebuilding using non-territorial frameworks.

In 1946, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was formed to promote peace through education and cross-cultural understanding. In the postwar atomic age, American leaders saw UNESCO and education for world citizenship as critical to the prevention of future war, the promotion of a new pluralistic vision, and the development of a well-informed society. A hyper-local case study, this article follows the story of Milton S. Eisenhower, leading UNESCO delegate and president of Kansas State College, and the series of progressive reforms he pursued to promote democracy, citizenship, and global peacebuilding at a rural land-grant college in the center of the former “isolationist belt” of America. This article traces the impact of these curricular reforms, the UNESCO campus-community partnership they inspired, and the subsequent peacebuilding movement that agitated for humanitarian action, civic participation, and desegregation from 1947 to 1950.

Can United Nations peace operations improve their effectiveness and strengthen longer-term positive legacies in host nations by shifting to greater use of renewable energy? Since the end of the Cold War and the growth of modern UN peace operations, attention has been focused on the missions’ mandate of supporting political strategies for peace and core objectives such as protecting civilians. Could missions better meet their mandate with improved energy options and reduced emissions, or is there a trade-off with the core objectives? As the missions are nearly fully dependent on diesel generators to power their operations, what is the UN’s responsibility to reduce emissions at a time when addressing climate change is a priority of the UN Secretary-General? Is there an ethical case to make for the UN to support greater use of renewable energy where it operates? And could the UN partner with host nations and others to support a shift in energy use that benefits the communities that host peace operations? This essay argues that missions could reduce their emissions and leverage their energy needs to increase security, strengthen ties to local communities, increase energy access, and support the climate goals of host nations. Drawing on case studies in recent peacekeeping missions and the author’s review of UN commitments across mandates, the Sustainable Development Goals, peacebuilding, and climate goals, this essay will address this area of potential innovation that can help build a positive legacy for UN missions and countries emerging from conflict.