Call for papers – Amnesty to Counter Insurgency

AMNESTY TO COUNTER INSURGENCY:
GLOBAL COMPARISONS FROM THE COLONIAL CONTEXT, 1920-2000

Workshop
Global History & Culture Centre, University of Warwick
14-15 June 2018

This workshop is part of a Leverhulme Trust Research Network on Understanding Insurgencies: Resonances from the Colonial Past. Led by the University of Exeter’s Centre for War, State and Society, other collaborators in this international network are the University of Warwick, University of Oxford, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Paris, University of Glasgow, Universite de Québec à Montréal, and KITLV Institute Leiden. The network is funded by the Leverhulme Trust to stage a series of workshops and conferences over a three-year period, (commencing June 2016), and leading to publications.

The theme of this sixth workshop in the Understanding Insurgencies series is ‘Amnesty to Counter Insurgency’. The intention is to examine the manner in which amnesties have been used to bring about temporary cease-fires during counter-insurgency campaigns, to induce surrenders or the ending of hostilities that will bring conflict to an end, or as a means of engaging political discourse in order to generate a negotiated peace. We invite presentations that give detailed consideration to individual case studies during the twentieth century, but would also welcome papers which take a comparative approach and those that look at the principles and pit-falls that lie behind amnesty settlements, including papers that consider the political consequences of amnesties – where these may be contested as well as where they are accepted.

We hope to include cases that will feature major colonial counter-insurgency campaigns from South-East Asia (Indo-China, Dutch East Indies, Phillipines, Malaya), from Africa (Kenya, Rhodesia, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique), and from the Middle East and Mediterranean (Palestine, Cyprus). We will also include the cases of Northern Ireland and South Africa, where the colonial heritage of the amnesties used to end long-running conflicts was explicit, and cases, such as Congo and Burundi, where the wars and political violence immediately following colonial withdrawal were a product of a failed colonial settlement.

A key feature of this Network has been the inclusion of both historical and political science perspectives on insurgency, and paper proposals are welcome from both disciplines.

If you wish to offer a paper to this workshop please contact
Professor David M. Anderson

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