Violent Societies / Rethinking Political Violence (PDF)

Christina Steenkamp is a Lecturer in Social and Political Change at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She researches and publishes on issues surrounding violence, civil wars, peace processes and reconstruction. Her previous publications include the monograph Violence and Post-war Reconstruction: Managing Insecurity in the Aftermath of Peace Accords (2009).

"This book provides a welcome addition to research on peace and war. By studying various forms of violence in post-war societies it sheds new light on the continuities and discontinuities of the structures and cultures created by the experience of war. Drawing on research on Northern Ireland, South Africa, Lebanon and Syria, it highlights the multiple layers of understanding of violence in these contexts as well as the blurring of boundaries of violence with social, political, economic and criminal motivations." - Kristine Höglund, Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Sweden

"The book addresses a topic that is both a nagging public policy issue, and a scholarly puzzle: why do some societies that experience longstanding civil conflicts, which are eventually brought to conclusion with formal peace accords, then still continue to generate public violence, albeit in a different form? [...] What makes this book stand out from other works on these 'new wars' is the deployment of a clear, crisp and precise conceptual framework, with a broad comparative perspective, and the use of original data from interviews conducted in Northern Ireland and South Africa. Furthermore, this study also distinguishes itself in its range: from the identification of the origins of this violence through to an analysis of the interwoven nature of different types of violence, with a concluding chapter on the implications for long-term peacebuilding." - Prof Pierre Du Toit, Stellenbosch University, South Africa