Pardee School Hosts Workshop on Building Sustainable Peace in Iraq
Leading experts on Iraq met at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University on April 12, 2019 for a workshop entitled “Building Sustainable Peace in Iraq: The Role of Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Peace Building,” that explored how Iraqi state and society relations can benefit from peace-building paradigms as mechanisms for addressing stalled democratization.
Workshop attendees drew on comparative case studies from states and regions equally devastated by war and external intervention, with the purpose of the workshop being twofold — to identify and elucidate the importance of transnational justice and peacebuilding as frameworks for addressing questions relation to the promotion of peace and security in war-torn societies both prior to and following the onset of the conflict and to stituate the case of Iraq, as a divided cosiety, within the existing literature on post-conflict state and peacebuilding.
Shamiran Mako, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School, organized the workshop and presented a session on “Statebuilding Minus Peacebuilding: Evaluating and Remedying the Legacies of Iraq’s De-Baathification Commission.”
Other presenters included Marsin Alshamary, Zahra Ali, Michael Youash, Ruba Al Hassani, Ibrahim Al Marashi, Toby Dodge, Hannibal Travis, and Alistair Edgar.
Speakers aimed to move beyond reiterating narratives fixated on accentuating segmental cleavages and socio-economic and political stagnation to more actively contemplating conflict mitigating strategies that foster cross-communal cooperation and socio-economic and political reform.
Drawing on leading experts, the workshop offered nuanced approaches to addressing issues relating to reconciliation through trauma storytelling; the efficacy and applicability of security sector reform and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration; women’s activism and civil society networks; transitional justice and human security between Iraq’s regions; critical approaches to framing peacebuilding and institutional reform in post-2003 Iraq; the challenges and prospects of federalism in Iraq; and the implications and reform of Iraq’s de-Baathification commission.
Shamiran Mako’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics with a focus on authoritarianism, civil wars, democratization, institutional capacity building, governing in divided societies, and American foreign policy with a regional interest on the Middle East and North Africa. Specifically, she explores the historical and contemporary drivers of inter and intra-state conflicts that produce weak and fragile states and examines ways in which successful conflict mitigating strategies relating to post-conflict state and peacebuilding can be applied to states in the MENA region.