‘Peacebuilding or pacification? From the North of Ireland to Palestine’

In collaboration with the Department of English, Language and Communication and the Department of Humanities, The Office of the Dean of Research is pleased to invite you to a talk titled, “Peacebuilding or pacification? From the North of Ireland to Palestine.” The talk will be given by the Irish scholar and political activist Dr. Brendan Ciarán Browne.

Date: Tuesday (May 16, 2023)

Time: 11:00 am

Venue: Furno Hall

Abstract

Against the backdrop of enduring Israeli settler colonialist expansion in historic Palestine, the selective application of the Northern Ireland ‘Peace Process’ to the ‘Israel/Palestine Conflict’ ignores root causes and acts as a blunt instrument, one that sustains a deeply unjust status quo whilst eschewing decolonisation as the ultimate goal. Transposing a Northern Irish peace model to Palestine/Israel embeds the ‘conflict’ by promoting its own discourse of ‘peacebuilding’, one that is silent on the language of colonisation, which in turn marginalises the legitimacy of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance and prioritises westernized notions of ‘peace’ over international obligations to promote ‘justice’. Here, Dr Browne will reflect on his recently published work that critiques the liberal discourse of transitional justice and the exportation of a Northern Irish peacebuilding framework that has been lauded as a useful model of export to Palestine/Israel.

Bio:

Dr Brendan Ciarán Browne is Tenured Assistant Professor of Conflict Resolution, Discipline of Peace Studies, and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He holds an LLB and LLM (in Law and Human Rights) and a PhD in Sociology, all from Queen’s University Belfast. He has held positions at Queen’s University Belfast and Al Quds University (Bard College), Palestine, where he taught transitional justice and the laws of armed conflict. His research interests are situated around conflict and transitional justice, violent displacement in conflict, and peacebuilding as pacification.