ABSTRACT
For nearly every protracted armed conflict in today’s world, there is a concomitant peace process. The phrase normally refers to an actual ongoing sequence of events: negotiations in mutually accepted rules of interaction that parties have accepted as a potential means for potentially resolving their differences through dialogue instead of (or, as this book shows, as a companion to) violence. Peace processes are seen as potentially resolving differences non-violently because these negotiations often occur while the battles on the ground continue to be waged. As noted in the Introduction, a formal definition of a peace process is: a series of step-by-step, reciprocal, and self-reinforcing actions that are taken to steadily move a conflict away from violence toward regularized, consensual non-violent rules of interaction.1
