Overview

In this work, Anna Snyder provides a detailed account of the challenges women representatives in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) faced in building bridges across diverse ethnic, racial, national, regional, and ideological backgrounds at the 4th United Nations (UN) Conference on Women. This book traces the process by which women's peace groups set an agenda for global policies in the area of women and armed conflict. This text shows how NGOs use conflict to develop transnational social movements and to build consensus around issues of global concern. Using this conference as a case study, Snyder finds three purposes for social movement conflict: contention arising from policy development; deep-rooted historical conflict; and conflicts over NGO network priorities. Drawing together feminist, conflict resolution, and social movement theories, this comprehensive text analyzes the large scale decision making processes for NGOs and points towards future directions for conflict resolution and consensus building.

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9780754619338

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Reviews

'This book provides a fascinating account and analysis of what happens when women across the world try to develop policies to advance peace. Anna Snyder honestly faces the difficult realities of using consensual processes to forge agreements among women in diverse non-governmental organizations with unequal power and whose members differ in culture and historical experiences. Most significantly, with enlightening specificity, she presents effective ways to deal constructively with the inevitable conflicts that arise in these increasingly important efforts.' Louis Kriesberg, Maxwell Professor Emeritus of Social Conflict Studies, Syracuse University, USA 'Setting the Agenda for Global Peace explores one of the most important problems faced by those organizing for social change: How do groups overcome their many differences in order to mobilize unified movements for social justice? Anna Snyder's rich accounts help illuminate the ways that activists expressed their conflicts in the course of organizing around the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, and her analysis integrates theory and research on conflict resolution to assess the relationships between conflicts and coalition building. In the process, she presents a detailed and insightful look at some of the social processes that are subsumed under the amorphous label of globalization. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of all social movements and conflicts (not just transnational ones) and for practitioners seeking to build coalitions across class, culture, race, and other differences.' Professor Jackie Smith, State University New York, Stony Brook, USA 'This lively and creative ethnography follows activists from three regions as they participate in the development of a global women's peace movement. The analysis highlights moments when individual agency and the strategic efforts of activists are effective, but also illuminates how structural inequalities can undermine cooperative intentions. Snyder offers an insightful view of conflict as useful, when handled constructively, and perhaps even necessary if we are to come together in genuine dialogue.' Professor Marjorie L. DeVault, Syracuse University, USA 'This unusual book explores a double challenge. For NGOs, of learning how to collaborate and network across conflicting agendas and diverse histories and cultural practices at international conferences, and for activists, of developing a transnational activist identity. Choosing three different women's peace organizations representing very different political and cultural orientations and observing their interaction at the regional and global prepcoms up to and finally including the 1995 UN Women's Conference in Beijing was a brilliant strategy. The stories that unfold throughout the book are compelling. The reader is richly rewarded with a number of thought-provoking insights into different types of conflict resolution scenarios, and the critical importance of that basic form of human communication, dialogue.' Elise Boulding, Formerly Secretary-General, International Peace Research Association, Formerly Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College, USA '...very useful...a book worth reading for those involved in international and intercultural peace efforts...' transnational-perspectives.org 'Anna Snyder's writing is lively and the persons she describes standout as real personalities. There is a good bibliography of books dealing with NGOs in the UN system and works on conflict resolution through dialogue - a book worth reading for those involved in international and intercultural peace efforts.' Transnational Perspectives

Author Information

Anna C. Snyder, Menno Simons College, Canada

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