ABSTRACT
Peace and human rights are connected to broader goals of social reconstruction and liberal peacebuilding with new thematic areas of priority, such as constitution making, gender aspects and attention to local, bottom-up peacebuilding initiatives. Researchers, policy makers, and the public need to understand more clearly the meanings of peace and human rights. As the field expands there is inevitably an increasing lack of common understanding of values and priorities. Less attention has been paid to the substance of those interactions, the role of support actors, or indeed to the nature of the relationship between peace and human rights. In this chapter, peace and human rights are concerned de facto with the idea of justice and self-determination. I make the case that including human rights in peace research means transitioning to a positive concept of peace. The ambition of this chapter is to prepare the ground for dialogue between BHR theory and peace research. The first step in such a dialogue is to re-ask questions such as “what is peace?” and “what are human rights?” Rooted in the early organisational psychology work, sensemaking has emerged as an influential perspective in understanding how people construct meaning to their individual and collective experiences and how people attempt to influence how others think, which refers to a sense-making perspective. This chapter addresses the question of how employees in the mining industry make sense of human rights and peace and focuses on sensemaking as the experience of being thrown into an ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable streaming of experience in search of answers to the question, “what is the story behind human rights and peace?”
