Please join the Harriman Institute and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) for a talk with Martin Wählisch, author of Peacemaking, Power-Sharing and International Law: Imperfect Peace (Bloomsbury/Hart 2019), moderated by David L. Phillips, Director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at ISHR.
Martin Wählisch's book provides a contemporary analysis of the frictions between peacemaking and international human rights law based on the cases of postconflict power-sharing in Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this context, Wählisch evaluates the long-standing debate in the United Nations and human rights bodies about the 'imperfect peace'. Written from a practitioner–scholarly viewpoint and drawing from new authentic sources, the book describes the mechanisms used in peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions for managing ethnic or religious diversity, explains their legal limits under international human rights law, and provides a conceptual framework for analysing the nexus between law and peacemaking. The book argues that the relationship between the content of peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions, their negotiation process and the element of time, needs to be untangled to better understand the legal limits of statebuilding in the aftermath of armed conflict. It is a key resource for scholars in human rights law and peace and conflict studies, advisers in peace processes, constitution-makers, and peace mediators.
Martin Wählisch works for the United Nations on peace processes, national dialogues and conflict prevention, and is an Affiliated Lecturer at the Center for Peace Mediation and the Institute for Conflict Management at the European University Viadrina. He holds a PhD in International Law and an MA in Mediation.
