Chuck Thiessen

Economic Assistance, Development and Peacebuilding: The Role of the IFI and EU Peace II Fund in Northern Ireland

This article examines the images of 98 study participants interviewed during the summer of 2006 and a public opinion survey of 1,023 adults conducted in October 2006 with regards to the role of the European Union (EU) Peace II Fund and the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) in community development, reconciliation, and sustainable peacebuilding. The perceptions of community group leaders, funding agency civil servants, and development officers are explored with regards to the role of both funds in building the peace dividend in Northern Ireland. Further, the article explains the importance of community development and cross-community contact through joint economic, peace and justice, and social development projects.

Civil Society Leaders and Northern Ireland's Peace Process: Hopes and Fears for the Future

This article explores the interview narratives of 98 Northern Irish participants (consisting of NGO and community group leaders, development officers, and civil servants responsible for funding grassroots peacebuilding work) regarding their hopes and fears for the future. These civil society leaders expressed a wide variety of hopes and fears addressing both the micro grassroots and the macro political levels of society. An analysis of these expressed hopes and fears is both instructive and significant. Civil society peacebuilding actors have been given significant voice in the Northern Ireland peace process. The findings reveal significant hope that reconciliation work at the grassroots level will be successful, but conversely, they also reveal noticeable fear regarding the political peace process and the resumption of political violence.

Proceed with Caution: Research Production and Uptake in Conflict-Affected Countries

The effectiveness of (neo)liberal intervention in conflict zones remains ambiguous, with supportive and critical camps of scholars and practitioners embracing disparate viewpoints that are each propped up by rigorous empirical analysis. The consequences of this empirical ambiguity have deeply permeated international intervention organisations, who use these unsettled findings for decision- and policy-making. This article argues that the promotion of disparate intervention methodologies is entirely predictable given the existence of contested relationships between prominent underlying themes to the debates around peacebuilding and development intervention: globalisation, development aid, inequality, and poverty, and their roles in inciting or preventing violence. These contested relationships justify the cautious selection and interpretation of research findings by decision- and policy-makers. The concluding discussions explore the impact of biased research production and uptake processes that bolster self-interested intervention practices and outline several recommendations for better aligning evidence-based decision- and policy-making with the needs of conflict-affected populations.