Jus Post Bellum as a Deliberative Process: Transnationalising Peace-Building

Abstract

The approach to peace-building is explored on two levels. The first is to see peace-building as the product of reconstructing political society so that it becomes more transnational, not only in the sense of having greater diversity, but also in distributing decisional powers more broadly. A necessary condition for constructing a transnational society is to create the ties of communicative status across the borders of communities. In Northern Ireland, these borders were religious, and the multi-track processes across the boundaries of conflict helped to produce the ties that supported the settlement. In many cases, the construction of a transnational society with its own norms and forms of interaction and communication is facilitated by various intermediaries, such as the peace networks in Northern Ireland that cut across religious difference. Second, on this same model, a global multilevel dialogue about peace and justice also seems possible, especially as transnational public spheres expand the scope of interaction, and this process is also aided by the emergence of new intermediaries such as the World Social Forum. Such intermediaries are not the only way in which transnational forums are created; indeed various formal institutions may act as forums, including various international courts in which debates about the scope and applications of international criminal, humanitarian and human rights norms are worked out publicly in deliberation.