Lost in Transformation: Violent Peace and Peaceful Conflict in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This is a book review of Audra Mitchell’s Lost in Transformation: Violent Peace and Peaceful Conflict in Northern Ireland, a study of the need for a serious re-consideration of the nature of transformative peace interventions in conflict-ridden contexts. To illustrate her point, the author embarks upon an in-depth analysis of the effects the initiatives that have been implemented in Northern Ireland since the mid-twentieth century produced on the major conflicting parties. Through the lens of constructive criticism, Audra Mitchell questions both the success and peacefulness of the Northern Ireland peace process against a backdrop of widespread praise of the process as an exemplary model of peace-building. The alternative to this conventional intervention is envisaged by her as a new ethos of orientation toward the interrelation between violence, conflict and peace. It is one that promotes the concept of plural world-building over the practice of peace-building alone, in an effort to ensure that more is consciously created in peace interventions than is inadvertently destroyed.