Disciplinary Divides in Post-Conflict Justice and Peace: Tracking If and How we Share Ideas

ABSTRACT

The study of post-conflict justice and peace incorporates ideas from many disciplines and on a range of topics including justice, reconciliation, democratization, and peace. While diversity is valuable, it can also lead to confusion in theory and practice and so requires close evaluation of how diverse ideas interact, and to what end. This paper begins the systematic examination of such interactions by using new bibliometric software to track citations between two particularly influential literatures contributing to post-conflict theory: the legal and the psychosocial. The paper describes how these traditions interact and the impact on the post-conflict literature as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacebuilding
• transitional justice
• intergroup reconciliation
• citation analysis
• interdisciplinarity
• bibliometric analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gearoid Millar is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen’s Institute for Conflict, Transition, and Peace Research (ICTPR). His research focuses on local experiences of peacebuilding, transitional justice and development mechanisms in post-conflict societies and the ethnographic methodologies necessary to understand those experiences. ([email protected])

Jesse Lecy is Assistant Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. His research examines how structural components of civil society, such as resource constraints and accountability mechanisms, create incentive systems that influence non-profit behaviour and performance. ([email protected])