This book explores the resilience in urban neighborhoods affected by chronic conflict and violence, developing a new model for improving resilience policies. The neighborhood resilience approach is an inclusive form of building positive resilience, which recognizes that local communities possess valuable skills and experience of dealing with crises, and prioritizes the agency of local communities in the production of knowledge and developing practices. The book identifies and describes the repertoire of neighborhood resilience practices organized in four clusters: (1) addressing the structure of conflict; (2) increasing the effectiveness of external resources; (3) enhancing the community capacities; and (4) reflecting the dynamics of identity and power in neighborhoods. One of the key findings of the book is the nonlinear connections between structure and dynamics of conflict and neighborhood resilience practices represented in the Four Loops Model. The concentration on community-based practices addresses macro-level critiques of neo-liberalism in critical resilience studies and encourages rethinking the ways community-based indicators might operate in combination with existing macro indicators of resilience. The bottom-up indicators provide more specific details and essential localized experiences for improving resilience policies at the national level. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, resilience, urban studies, and US politics.

The recent conflict in Iraq evolved from an insurgency against the interim U.S. led government (the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA) into a sectarian civil war. Violence became widespread, especially in areas of Baghdad City such as Sadr City, Al Amiriyah, and Al Adhamiya. However, a number of multiethnic neighborhoods in Baghdad successfully prevented sectarian attitudes and behaviors from taking hold. Four communities stand out in their self-organization to prevent the escalation of violence. This book looks at what makes these communities different from other areas within Baghdad. In-depth interviews in Sunni-dominant, Shia-dominant and Mixed neighborhoods generated a few key insights about conflict-resilience, or the capacity to prevent structural changes associated with conflict escalation. Key factors turned out to be the organization of non-sectarian self-defense groups, place attachment, collective efficacy, active intervention to de-escalate tensions, and also the presence of local religious leaders who forbid sectarian attacks. The continuity or strength of interpersonal relationships supported by the integrated physical structure of these neighborhoods and internal versus tribal conflict resolution mechanisms played a role as well. This volume examines the characteristics of the communities that have successfully prevented the rise of violence, and how they are able to maintain qualities of resilience to violent conflict.

Enhancing existing green spaces, such as parks and gardens, or introducing them where they do not through conversion of lots, has taken center stage in urban communities of color as a means of addressing a range of social problems, including reducing various forms of violence. Written for urban-focused researchers, practitioners, and academics, Urban Gun Violence: Empty Lots, Green Spaces, and Other Ecologically Focused Interventions uses case studies and grounding research to inform gun violence reduction interventions.

The International Science and Evidence Based Education (ISEE) Assessment is an initiative of the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), and is its contribution to the Futures of Education process launched by UNESCO Paris in September 2019. In order to contribute to re-envisioning the future of education with a science and evidence based report, UNESCO MGIEP embarked on the first-ever large-scale assessment of knowledge of education.

This book calls for re-conceptualising urban recovery by exploring the intersection of reconstruction and displacement in volatile contexts in the Global South. It explores the spatial, social, artistic, and political conditions that promote urban recovery. Reconstruction and displacement have often been studied independently as two different processes of physical recovery and human migration towards safety and shelter. It is hoped that by intersecting or even bridging reconstruction with displacement we can cross-fertilize and exploit both discourses to reach a greater understanding of the notion of urban recovery as a holistic and multi-layered process. This book brings multidisciplinary perspectives into conversation with each other to look beyond the conflict-related displacement and reconstruction and into the greater processes of crises and recovery. It uses empirical research to examine how trauma, crisis, and recovery overlap, coexist, collide and redefine each other. The core exploration of this edited collection is to understand how the oppositional framing of destruction versus reconstruction and place-making versus displacement can be disrupted; how displacement is spatialized; and how reconstruction is extended to the displaced people rebuilding their lives, environments, and memories in new locations. In the process, displacement is framed as agency, the displaced as social capital, post-conflict urban environments as archives, and reconstructions as socio-spatial practices. With local and international insights from scholars across disciplines, this book will appeal to academics and students of urban studies, architecture, and social sciences, as well as those involved in the process of urban recovery.

We are witnessing an ever-increasing level and intensity of disasters from Ecuador to Ethiopia and beyond, devastating millions of ordinary lives and causing long-term misery for vulnerable populations. Bringing together 26 case studies from six continents, this volume provides a unique resource that discusses, in considerable depth, the multifaceted matrix of natural and human-made disasters. It examines their bearing on the loss of human and productive capital; the conduct of national policies and the setting of national development priorities; and on the nature of international aid and bilateral assistance strategies and programs of donor countries. In order to ensure the efficacy and appropriateness of their support for disaster survivors, international agencies, humanitarian and disaster relief organizations, scholars, non-governmental organizations, and members of the global emergency management community need to have insight into best practices and lessons learned from various disasters across national and cultural boundaries. The evidence obtained from the numerous case studies in this volume serves to build a worldwide community that is better informed about the cultural and traditional contexts of such disasters and better enabled to prepare for, respond to, and finally rebuild sustainable communities after disasters in different environments. The main themes of the case studies include: • the need for community planning and emergency management to unite in order to achieve the mutual aim of creating a sustainable disaster-resilient community, coupled with the necessity to enact and implement appropriate laws, policies, and development regulations for disaster risk reduction; • the need to develop a clear set of urban planning and urban design principles for improving the built environment’s capacities for disaster risk management through the integration of disaster risk reduction education into the curricula of colleges and universities; • the need to engage the whole community to build inclusive governance structures as prerequisites for addressing climate change vulnerability and fostering resilience and sustainability. Furthermore, the case studies explore the need to link the existence and value of scientific knowledge accumulated in various countries with decision-making in disaster risk management; and the relevance and transferability from one cultural context to another of the lessons learned in building institutional frameworks for whole community partnerships.

This book examines the role that community-based educators in violence-affected cities play in advancing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical nonviolent vision for racial and social justice. This work argues that nonviolence education can help communities build capacity to disrupt and transform cycles of violence by recognizing that people impacted by violence are effective educators and vital knowledge producers who develop unique insights into racial oppression and other forms of systemic harm. This book focuses on informal education that takes place beyond school walls, a type of education that too often remains invisible and undervalued in both civil society and scholarly research. It draws on thousands of hours of work with the Connecticut Center for Nonviolence (CTCN), a grassroots organization that presents an ideal case study of the implementation of King’s core principles of nonviolence in 21st-century urban communities. Stories of educators’ life-changing educational encounters, their successes and failures, and their understanding of the six principles of Kingian nonviolence animate the text. Each chapter delves into one of the six principles by introducing the reader to the lives of these educators, providing a rich analysis of how educators teach each principle, and sharing academic resources for thinking more deeply about each principle. Against the backdrop of today’s educational system, in which reductive and caricatured treatments of King are often presented within the formal classroom, CTCN’s work outside of the classroom takes a fundamentally different approach, connecting King’s thinking around nonviolence principles to working for racial justice in cities deeply impacted by violence. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, race studies, politics and education studies, as well as to practitioners in the field.