Economic aid and peacebuilding efforts to transform the Northern Ireland conflict impact grassroots, civil society organizations (CSOs) and vulnerable people of concern. Brexit is an example of how democracies privilege white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied voices, exclude marginalized voices from peacebuilding efforts, and maintain structural violence that exacerbates sectarian identity conflicts. A qualitative methodology was used to interview 120 participants who shared their experiences of grassroots peacebuilding efforts to transform the Northern Ireland conflict. Findings revealed that community audits are critical to inclusion of local needs, and helped to assess what escalates conflict, British job cuts create needs that overwhelm CSOs and youth who feel hopeless are attracted to sectarian paramilitary groups. They reject peace and trigger further conflict as a result.

This study discusses social accountability in Timor-Leste by scrutinizing the patterns of state-society interactions and the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Analyzing five case studies in peacebuilding and development, it highlights NGOs’ multiple positions—from oversight and advocacy, to their role in facilitating statesociety relations in service delivery, suggesting alternative forms of public services, and conveying citizens’ views on government performance to the state. It elaborates how NGOs are closely associated with suco (village) and community authorities and bridge the gap between the state and society. In a fledging state, these dynamics emerge from the state’s attempts to formalize this relationship into law and society’s accommodation of its citizens within the local context. The study also addresses international actors who strive to support NGOs.

Following the 2010 nuclear deal between Russia and Turkey, several consequent revelations of administrative deficiencies in the Turkish nuclear program, the Fukushima accident, and waste issues all spurted widespread protests across Turkey. This study analyzes how groups opposing nuclear power plants have framed the Akkuyu nuclear project as a dangerous, risky, disadvantageous, and irrational policy choice. Through analysis of empirical data from a range of sources such as in situ observation, semi-structured interviews, articles, and websites, the study considers the core issues raised and arguments given by the opponents.

Truth commissions (TCs) have become a recurrent mechanism for states to deal with and address past human rights violations. This article argues that TCs generate accountability relationships at three different stages. Before their establishment, TCs generate vertical accountability relationships between civil society and the state. During the period between their establishment and the release of the final report, TCs hold state agencies horizontally accountable. In their final reports, TCs put forward recommendations capable of generating horizontal accountability between the governing regime and the state agencies towards which the recommendations are directed, and vertical accountability as civil society pushes the governing regime to implement these recommendations. This article suggests criteria for evaluating how truth commissions contribute to promoting accountability.

Controversial and insufficient post-accident measures implemented by the Japanese government after the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in 2011 have caused prolonged anxieties over radiation. These anxieties resulted in multiple insecurities, including health, economic, food, environmental, community, personal, and political insecurities. The Fukushima disaster shows that threats to human security may come not only from the manifest “enemy” outside, but from “dysfunction of the state” supported by peoples’ choices to sacrifice the victims for the sake of the interests of the “majority,” which is called a “sacrificial system.” At the same time, people are still patiently trying to restore their human security by means of voluntary actions.

In the years immediately before and after the 1998 Lysøen Declaration, a striking feature of the initiatives associated with the human security agenda was the prominent role of civil society coalitions, which was widely regarded as indispensible to the signal successes of this period. However, the dramatic breakthroughs of this “new diplomacy” were the products of a propitious conjuncture of conditions that contained the seeds of their subsequent loss of momentum. Yet the human security work of civil society organizations (CSOs) continues, in less prominent but still important ways, to be woven into the fabric of the more cosmopolitan practices promoted by the agenda. In the meantime, their setbacks contain important lessons-both for CSOs and for the policymakers inclined to collaborate with them.

Distinguished colleagues from government, university, NGOs, and students; The Republic of Korea (South Korea) is a fitting host for this meeting on refugee rights, given the example it has shown by ratifying the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the 1951 Refugee Convention) in 1992 and for enacting its amended Refugee Act just last month. In today’s global village, people are constantly leaving their homes in search of new opportunities. In public debates, however, the distinction between refugees and other people on the move is often blurred. It is important to remember that refugees have a distinct legal status. Refugees are people who have been forced to leave their country because their lives are in danger. Migrants and other groups on the move make a conscious decision for economic and other reasons. Refugees do not have this choice. Refugees are forced to leave and need international protection. This is why 147 countries across the world have signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and thus have granted refugees a unique legal status. It is shameful that Asia remains the largest refugee hosting region with the fewest signatories; large populations of refugees are hosted by neighbouring states that have not even ratified the Refugee Convention. The extent to which Korea’s asylum policy is an example of good practice will no doubt be among the subjects for extensive analysis, dialogue, and debate throughout this week. There are an estimated sixteen million refugees in the world today and 80% of them are hosted by states in the Global South, where the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of most countries is below 3,000 US dollars. South Korea’s GDP per capita is 32,000 US dollars!