08-08-Lopez-DJHR

BOOK REVIEWS / CRÍTICAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS

López-López, Wilson, and Laura Taylor, eds. 2021. Transitioning to Peace: Promoting Global Social Justice and Non-violence. Cham: Springer. Peace Psychology Book Series. 328 p.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18543/djhr.2289

Frequently, the transition to peace seems impossible for groups affected by collective violence. The search for a peaceful society, where the memory, the victims’ suffering, and the perpetrators’ responsibilities coexist, requires titanic efforts in multiple dimensions that may seem unattainable. These efforts are the focus of the book “Transitioning to Peace: Promoting Global Social Justice and Non-Violence” edited by two distinguished scholars in the social and political psychology field with contributions from over twenty researchers from all continents.

This book is part of the Peace Psychology Book Series edited by Daniel Christie, which over the last few years has had a significant number of volumes analyzing psychology’s approaches to the search for peace. The editors of this book are Wilson López-López, professor at the Pontifical Xavierian University, who has a long tradition of research on collective violence, armed conflict, and peacebuilding for more than 20 years, and Laura Taylor, assistant professor at University College Dublin, who has a long career of 15 years and extensive experience in protracted conflicts, especially in various processes involving children, youth and families affected by violence.

Based on a multidimensional perspective of peace, the book explores the implications and difficulties faced by societies that have experienced large-scale collective violence. It addresses macro and micro social aspects, from diverse methodologies that complement a profound vision that promotes a systematic understanding of peacemaking processes. On many occasions, the fatalism and hopelessness of the context are added to a political, economic, and cultural structure to justify, support, and legitimize the use of violence. Likewise, in its content, we find a critical and reflective approach to transitional justice models while advocating for community developments and the practices of diverse vulnerable groups that contribute to a sustainable peace that responds to the specific needs of a population.

In this way, through four major sections, the authors guide us through high-impact research that seeks to intertwine in a back-and-forth vision between the multicultural analysis of important models of transitional justice, and processes and experiences at the local level that demonstrates the importance of communities in the construction of their forms of peace. In this regard, this book is divided into four sections that seek to address: 1. The implementation of transitional justice mechanisms in several countries, especially the analysis of truth commissions and their role in the construction of memory; 2. The social movements and collective actions that are framed in the transitions to peace, focusing on the need to engage societies in transitional processes; 3. The specific community processes that have contributed to peace in several countries, especially with victims’ groups or citizen initiatives; and finally 4. The educational initiatives to promote peace processes in younger populations.

The first section focuses on transitional justice and the processes of reparation and memory. It is characterized by covering a large number of contexts of collective violence where not only transitional models are analyzed, but also the variables immersed in the reconstruction process, i.e., memory, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Beyond this, the authors strive to propose a critical view, where they also discuss impunity, forgetting, and victimization narratives that may be present in these models. In addition, the lack of justice in terms of recognition of the wrongdoing appears as a limiting factor in the search for more peaceful societies.

Throughout five chapters, authors with a significant academic background synthesize complex experiences and evaluations of societies where transitional justice mechanisms were implemented or in societies in conflict. In these contexts, it is vital to create favorable environments for the construction of a historical memory that does not promote competitive victimization or narratives that make the other invisible as an active political subject and that recognize the suffering of victims as essential psychosocial needs for rebuilding the social fabric.

These first chapters offer very useful information at the local level for countries undergoing transition processes or seeking to consolidate models with these objectives. The crosscutting premise of this section is to reflect deeply and carefully on societies that have experienced traumatic events, alerting us to the shadow of impunity that can be part of reconciliation processes, and to the danger of forgetting as a tool for peacebuilding.

The complexity that involves countries in transition cannot be solved only with reparations and acknowledgments of responsibility, but also through a memory in which it is never possible to forget those past events were a violation of Human Rights. This implies that these violations had devastating consequences on social and political coexistence and that the experiences of those who lived through them must constitute the first foundations for installing a political system that removes the injustices and inequities produced by these events.

Consequently, at a global level, this section also makes it possible to emphasize that correlational and longitudinal evidence on transitional justice mechanisms indicates positive effects on the reconstruction of social ties, institutional trust, and the reduction of negative stereotypes towards exogroups. However, this does not mean that there are no negative implications and that such effects depend to a large extent on whether truth-seeking is accompanied by justice processes that satisfy the victims.

The second section of the book concerns social movements and collective action. The authors make an effort to emphasize that peacebuilding engages society as a whole. This is a very significant contribution to the literature on societies making transitions from war to peace. It makes it necessary for us to understand that the collective actions framed in the claim and search for more just and peaceful societies are fundamental to understanding societies as a whole.

Thus, this section is essential if we take into account that there is a consensus that transition processes should have a high degree of citizen participation and democratization of the social reality. Studying collective actions helps us to evaluate a non-legal and unofficial aspect of transitions, where the involvement of citizens is an essential input to understand that peacebuilding necessarily involves the recognition of the diverse groups and needs of the population.

Accordingly, the chapters in this section address the tension between the State’s response to a collective action by the population demanding to be heard and the consequences that this response has on the groups that are mobilizing. It also delves into the changes in the group members and the perceptions of the in-group concerning essential aspects such as solidarity, discrimination, peaceful expression, plurality, and justice. It also addresses discourses as a critical issue in the creation of identities and narratives that can enable peaceful outcomes as well as increased radicalization, competitive victimization, and extreme responses.

The usefulness of the results presented in these studies is evident. On the one hand, the discussion on the support for equity policies and collective actions through contact between groups with disparity of power is very interesting. On the other hand, the critical vision that the authors give when they talk about the need to take into account the historical path of societies that make possible the collective actions of the present. It is exciting to see the approaches gathered in this section throughout all the chapters and the multiple methodologies that account for local processes in contexts so diverse, complex, and challenging as Chile, Sudan, and Colombia. This section appropriately captures the efforts of groups to exert constant pressure to change a system that they feel does not represent their interests. It also exemplifies the contributions of psychology in a multidisciplinary field that is indispensable for understanding social change and contributing to the achievement of non-violent societies.

Following this same approach of analyzing these transition processes holistically, the third section of the book focuses on looking at a bottom-up perspective. A major concern in the transitions societies that have experienced collective violence is that the processes are usually viewed only from the top-down, that is, it is understood that almost exclusively the leaders, institutions, and power groups must make changes and decisions. In this section, it is argued that transition and peace-building processes are stabilized and maintained by the communities and that their initiatives are important to give stability and sustainability to a peace-focused project.

The authors of this section adopt a more reflective and experiential approach focused on communities affected by collective violence and are forced to create coping strategies in Rwanda and Colombia. These two contexts exemplify the efforts of communities to create spaces for the preservation of memory and the defense of Human Rights that are inputs for peacebuilding in societies in transition. It analyzes the role of local associations in the search for rapprochement between groups, forgiveness, and reconciliation, as well as the processes of subsistence and progress that the authors have witnessed. This section shows the closer and more human face of suffering, but also the strength of the affected communities and their willingness to build spaces for peace.

The last section of this book focuses on the future. Thus, it includes chapters dedicated to peace education in countries in transition focusing on children and youth. It presents a critique of how young people have been treated in peace processes and the lack of structural transformations in education systems. It highlights the threatening and challenging conditions that young people live in these contexts and their acts of peacebuilding that transform the conflict. Consequently, it explains a new approach to historical memory from the pedagogy, opting for interactive methodologies that increase empathy towards the victims and the commitment of young people with the past to achieve a future in peace.

In this section, the findings of important research groups that have found the role of children and youth as an active input for peacebuilding are also shared. On the one hand, Chapter 16 presents important findings regarding universal and unique patterns of peacebuilding among children in various countries. They focus mainly on prosocial behaviors among groups, for which they use Laura Taylor’s peacebuilding model. On the other hand, Chapter 17 presents case studies in different countries around the world in which programs focused on early childhood have positive effects on children and their families and, in the long term, on peacebuilding.

In sum, this book invites us to talk about a central theme in transitions: peace and Human Rights are two indissolubly linked terms. Moreover, peace means compromising life above all other conditions. The content of the four sections is a call for attention to efforts to heal —physically, psychologically, culturally, and socially— to create stable structures that prevent future violence and guarantee peace, life, and the defense of Human Rights. Throughout the text, the recognition of the complexity of peace is a latent guideline that recognizes and encourages multidisciplinary perspectives. These perspectives must consider the problem of peacebuilding from innovative academic approaches and mixed methodologies that respond to the magnitude of this task. Finally, it is an invitation for the scientific community to contribute locally and globally to understand and fulfill the specific needs of societies mistreated by violence.

Pablo Castro-Abril
Department of Social Psychology,
University of the Basque Country