Search results
You are looking at 1 - 2 of 2 items for :
- Author: Roger Mac Ginty x
- Politics x
- Refine by access: All content x
This chapter examines the relationship between social justice, security and peace. The authors note significant internal heterogeneity in India and Europe, despite the statebuilding efforts in India and standardization processes in Europe. The authors give an overview of five sets of ideas which have linked social justice and peace. All five sets of ideas are showing that if social justice is taken seriously then social harmony will be preserved and at the same time tensions will be reduced, together with chances for conflict. However, they find that peace accords have a tendency to emphasize security rather than welfare. This is because international interventions are usually led by leading actors from the global north who are guided by neoliberal agenda. They usually underplay social aspects of the state and emphasise its security aspect. This is one of the reasons why priority is given to security over social justice, when sequencing of activities in the intervention. The authors give an example of reforms in Georgia which led to drastic undermining of state in terms of social provision. They conclude that international attempts which focus on social justice are much fewer in numbers than those which address security issues.
Chapter 1 discusses the relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the EU. It finds a lot of similarities between the two entities especially in terms of their concern for democratic credentials and institutional design, increasingly based on neo-liberal principles. Both India and the EU give primacy to statebuilding in their conflict resolution strategies and emphasise the importance of development and bureaucracy in the process. The authors find that one of the main differences between the two entities is in the security measures they undertake. While the EU has a more relaxed approach to security policy, India puts emphasis on the use of hard security measures, seeing itself as a unitary sovereign actor rather than a quasi-federal entity (as with the EU). This is also one of the most common critiques of India's efforts in producing conflict resolution, along with the inefficiency of its governance and the corruption that surrounds it. The EU can be partly criticised for its selective approach to conditionalities in accession/association process which in some cases even resembles the colonial past of some of the most prominent members of the EU. The authors conclude that the two entities achieve a certain level of governmentality while their success in producing conflict resolution in a purer form of reconciliation and social justice is relatively limited.