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This chapter explores the complex overlap between public protection, psychiatry and national security in UK public protection. In the 2011 Prevent Strategy, counter-radicalisation was presented as a ‘safeguarding’ response designed to identify vulnerable individuals who posed a potential threat to the public. Vulnerability was presented as equally distributed across society. Unlike traditional safeguarding, referrals do not rely upon a disability, drug dependency or violent living conditions to frame someone as vulnerable to abuse; instead, extreme ideologies supposedly render everyone potentially vulnerable to terrorist transformation. Since 2015 there has been an enormous increase in Prevent referrals to over 7,000 per year. This increase has provoked policy interventions that seek to reframe vulnerability to radicalisation, to facilitate greater efficiency in public protection. The chapter explores the operations of the ‘vulnerability support hubs’, which bring psychologists into counterterrorism policing headquarters to purport to identify the most ‘high-risk’ potential terrorists for medical detention or surveillance. Like the ‘hubs’, the reform of public protection arrangements (MAPPA) also frames the state as vulnerable to the actions of disordered individuals. Efficiency drives have produced a ‘waxing and waning’ of ‘vulnerability’ in UK public protection, with psychiatry taking on significant responsibility for securing the ‘vulnerable’ state.

This introductory chapter lays out the concept of vulnerability used in the book, exploring how social policy and national security have been reorganised through the notion that vulnerable people might one day become expensive or dangerous. In this world, care is no longer strictly care, and repression is no longer solely repressive. ‘Vulnerability governance’ remakes social security and national security in each other’s image – justifying welfare interventions on the predication that future danger will be averted, while justifying security interventions through a ‘duty of care’ to the pre-criminal individual. But we cannot rely on a simple distinction between the eras of welfarism and neoliberalism to understand ‘governance through vulnerability’. While advanced liberal societies have moved away from welfare discourses and addressing needs for the sake of addressing needs, the welfare state always contained elements of a national security agenda. The first welfare states were constructed, in part, to protect the institutions of state from the general strike. So, social security and national security have developed alongside each other – and may even be co-dependent. The novelty of ‘vulnerability governance’ is that, in the contemporary era, this overlapping matrix of care and securitising logics now centres upon individuals as the target for interventions. Rather than the population-wide target of the original welfare states, or the focus of advanced liberal governance on problem groups and communities, ‘vulnerability’ is flexible enough to be applied to individuals – at one end of the spectrum – or even democratic systems at the other.

This chapter explores a unique configuration of vulnerability and minority themes in the context of counter-extremism policy in the Czech Republic. Unlike in the West, where vulnerability refers to individual susceptibility to violent radicalisation, the Czech official counter-extremism documents frame the liberal democratic political system as vulnerable. Yet, while Muslim minorities in the West are deemed to produce individuals vulnerable to radicalisation, the threat to liberal democracy in the Czech Republic is framed (within Czech counter-extremism documents) as coming from the majority population. This extremism, it is feared, could capitalise on the ‘social pathologies’ of the Roma minority and mobilise the public against them, and the liberal democratic state. The chapter also briefly explores the situation in Slovakia, Hungary and Poland to highlight the reasons for the uniqueness of the Czech case. The analysis in this chapter draws on the Czech official documents dealing with the fight against extremism and interviews conducted with current and former state officials and experts in the region.

How do contemporary political parties envision intergroup relations in South Africa? The visions of political parties are important for peace as these can either mirror or shape people’s views and behavior. The transition from apartheid to democracy was eased by the idea of the Rainbow Nation, which encapsulates a recognition of diversity and a sense of colorblindness whereby South Africa belongs to “all who live in it,” as the preamble to the constitution states. Using the relational peace framework, this chapter contributes to the literature on nation-building by investigating how contemporary political parties (the African National Congress, Democratic Alliance, Economic Freedom Fighters, and Freedom Front Plus) discuss intergroup relations of peace and violent conflict and how they describe a vision of future intergroup relations. Parties based on civic nationalism champion a common identity and aim for a society where ethnicity and race are politically irrelevant. By contrast, both multiculturalism and ethno-nationalism recognize ethnicity as important for intergroup relations. The relational peace framework helps identify which dyads are seen as important in the political party manifestos – who is seen as a legitimate counterpart and who is excluded from discussions related to nation-building and intergroup peace. The assessment of the manifestos using the framework’s elements proves fruitful in capturing the type of nation-building. The analysis of 2019 election manifestos shows a variety of competing visions. These disagreements on who belongs to the South African nation pose a challenge to the legitimacy of the state and peace.

Rebuilding relationships between different actors in societies broken by prolonged social conflict is an important part of peacebuilding. This process is particularly challenging where levels of violence are still high and state security actors continue to occupy a powerful position even after a peace accord is signed. In this difficult transition period between war and peace, military and civilian actors, in the government as well as in civil society and the communities, often struggle with the task of redefining their relationships to each other. Applying the relational peace framework, this chapter looks particularly at how representatives of the military and of different civilian state and non-state actors in post-accord Colombia perceive their relationships to each other today, how they view the military's role in post-accord peacebuilding, and what they identify as challenges to relational peace. The findings, based on field interviews conducted in 2017 and 2018, show significant differences in how the actors assess their interactions, think of each other, and evaluate their current and future relationship. Identified as a peace between agonists characterized by a lack of mutual respect, trust, and cooperation, the interaction between the actors in the dyad shows important obstacles to achieving a higher level of relational peace in the future. In the end, however, friendship might be neither attainable nor desirable as the ultimate form of relational peace for civil–military relations.

The arts, while still at the outskirts of prevailing debates in politics, have gained increasing interest for possible applications in peacebuilding. Participatory art forms such as theater, dance, and music offer a particularly apt platform to bring adversaries together and build relationships across conflict divisions at an everyday level. Existing literature argues that we need sound empirical studies and conceptual frameworks to understand the process of arts-based peacebuilding. To address this call, the chapter uses the relational peace framework to explore the peacebuilding practice of the Sri Lankan theater group Jana Karaliya. Jana Karaliya was established in 2002 as a multiethnic, bilingual, mobile theater group. The chapter focuses on the group’s Tamil and Sinhala members and the ways in which their interpersonal relations shift across foes, fellows, and friends over time, during the course of their work. The chapter draws from participant observation, focus group interviews with longstanding members of the group, and individual interviews with selected members, and further benefits from insights gathered through continued engagement with the group since 2007. Applying the relational peace framework enables us to see how relations within Jana Karaliya transform because of their sustained interaction and shared vision of performing peace, amid changing phases of the Sri Lankan conflict. The chapter is rigorous in its empirical investigation and application of the framework. It makes a significant and an original contribution to arts-based peacebuilding by illustrating how we can map relational transitions that take place in long-term participatory arts-based peacebuilding initiatives.

The main motivation behind the book is to identify tools with which we can empirically study peace beyond the absence of war. Our approach is to study relational peace practices. This chapter provides an overview of the structure and content of the edited volume, which as a whole analyzes relational peace in several sites, including Cyprus, Cambodia, South Africa, Abkhazia, Transnistria/Russia, Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Myanmar. Each chapter makes its own unique contribution to specific literatures related to its field, including civil–military relations, frozen peacebuilding, peace- and nation-building, negotiation and mediation literatures, arts-based peacebuilding initiatives, post-war elite studies, ideational analysis, and post-Soviet studies and everyday peace. The introductory chapter develops the theoretical framework for studying relational peace, which serves as a basis for the case studies. Relational peace entails non-domination, deliberation, and cooperation between the actors in the dyad; moreover, the actors involved must recognize and trust each other, and their idea of the relationship should be one between fellows or an expression of friendship. The chapter introduces some of the methodological implications of studying peace in this manner. The edited volume as a whole demonstrates how the framework can be applied to different types of cases and across different dyads in different geographical locations, levels of analysis, stages of peace processes, and types of actor dyads. It suggests that the most fruitful analysis can be conducted when the framework is used as analytical tool for assessing how relationships evolve and comparing shifts over time or across dyads or cases.

The continuity of elites after war remains the norm despite efforts and recommendations to remove them. In order to better understand how peace develops, it is thus essential to pay attention to warring elites who take on prominent roles in post-war politics. This chapter examines the degree of relational peace in the case of Cambodia, where a peace process was initiated in the 1990s. This case is thus particularly useful if we want to understand the development of peace in the long run. Cambodia is an extreme case in terms of elite continuity, and is often categorized as a hybrid peace case. This chapter moves beyond that categorization by examining a range of signatories to peace agreements and their relations with their counterparts in the peace agreement from the time the agreement was signed until April 2018. It examines the political relationship among the domestic peace signatories of the Paris Peace Accords (October 23, 1991) over twenty-six years in Cambodia. It draws on content analysis of newspaper articles where signatories are mentioned in order to study how elite relations across a previously antagonistic divide have developed. The focus on newspaper articles inherently means a focus on the public role and statements of elites, as these internal elites shape both macro-politics and public opinion. Many years after signing the peace agreement, there are still reasons for concern. Overall, the main relationship is characterized by domination, distrust, and ideas of dependency.

The final chapter draws theoretical and comparative conclusions based on the case studies in the book. The relational approach contributes to a more nuanced understanding of peace beyond the absence of war by recognizing peace as a web of multiple interactions across time, space, and levels. The chapter discusses the advantages and challenges for studying peace as relational and the implications of this approach for theory, methodology, and policy. Relational peace practices need to be studied in an actor-centric and processual way, as it is the repeated interactions between actors that over time establish the practices of the relationship. The concluding chapter also addresses some of the methodological consequences and tradeoffs as identified throughout the book, particularly those related to delimiting actors, distinguishing appropriate data and sources for use when studying processes over time. The empirical study of relational peace allows us to see the varied practices of interactions, for instance, as well as the range of attitudes and ideas that relations are imbued with. It also helps us identify important future visions of the relationship, which can be important for the overall understanding and assessment of relational peace as well as for what is needed for peace to deepen. Importantly, the framework can be applied at different levels of analysis and allows us to identify changes in relationships and how relationships evolve over time. The chapter ends with some implications for policy and some suggestions of future avenues of research.