ABSTRACT

This article explores lesson sharing between local civil society peacebuilders in the Korean and Northern Ireland peace processes. It presents reciprocal empowerment, a concept primarily utilized in women’s empowerment literature, as a useful conceptual framework to be developed for examining interactions between local civil society peacebuilders who have mutual self-interest to overcome obstacles in top-down peace processes. Recently, historical similarities and concurrences in the peace processes have been increasing the lesson sharing visits between Korean and Northern Irish peacebuilders. Based on the in-depth empirical research on these visits, this article argues that comparative consultations between peace processes would not only generate useful lessons for each context, but also empower local peacebuilders, civil society in particular, provided the comparisons and interactions are reciprocal, not unidirectional or hierarchical. In this sense, this article contributes to the conceptual and practical discussions of every day, emancipatory peacebuilding.

摘要

本文探讨了当地民间社会和平建设者在韩国和北爱尔兰和平进程中的经验分享。它提出了互惠赋权这一主要在妇女赋权文献中使用的概念，作为一个有用的概念框架，可用于研究地方民间社会和平建设者之间的互动，这些建设者具有共同的自身利益，以克服自上而下的和平进程中的障碍。最近，和平进程中的历史相似性和共识增加了韩国和北爱尔兰和平建设者之间的经验分享访问。基于对这些访问的深入实证研究，本文认为，和平进程之间的比较协商不仅可以为每种情况提供有用的经验教训，还可以增强当地和平建设者，特别是民间社会，前提是比较和交互是互惠的，而不是单向的或分层的。从这个意义上说，本文有助于每天进行解放性和平建设的概念和实践讨论。