Deliberative Peacemaking draws on cases from international negotiations to national dialogues and local peace initiatives to explore how deliberative democracy can be a practical resource for with the potential to improve the prospects of achieving, maintaining, or building peace.
Peace scholars and practitioners have increasingly come to view deliberative democracy, with its commitment to channelling disagreement into reasoned forms of decision-making, as an appealing and empirically promising approach to peacemaking. Deliberative democracy requires individuals to justify the laws they would impose on one another by giving reasons for their political claims and responding to others' reasons in return, drawing on political values that others can reasonably be expected to share.
This volume brings deliberative democracy research to the forefront of peace and conflict studies, and vice versa. Its chapters explore why peace initiatives frequently falter when deliberation is absent, and how tools for deliberation can help make inclusive dialogue productive rather than polarizing. Drawing on cases from international negotiations to national dialogues and local peace initiatives, Deliberative Peacemaking offers evidence-based tools and institutional designs that turn conflict into shared learning and fairer decisions, helping make peace processes more legitimate, inclusive, and durable. In doing so, it demonstrates that deliberation is far from a naïve ideal: under the right conditions, it is a practical resource for achieving just, inclusive, and durable peace.
As the first comprehensive account of deliberative peacemaking, this book maps a growing field at the intersection of democratic theory and peace research, offering empirically grounded designs and practices for making deliberation work even amid deep and violent conflict.
Chapters 1 and 23 of this work are available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International open access licence. These parts of the work are free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
