Description

About the Book

Editors Prof Ron Levy, Prof Allison McCulloch and Prof Ian O’Flynn.

Deliberative peacemaking is an emerging approach to peace that uniquely combines democratic inclusion with rigorous deliberation. Inclusion matters because it brings affected voices into peace processes, broadens the knowledge base of negotiations, and strengthens the legitimacy and durability of agreements. But deliberation is equally crucial: it focuses on how deeply divided groups can actually reach workable agreements in practice – even under conditions of mistrust, polarisation, and violence. An expanding body of scholarship and practice suggests that deliberative peacemaking models hold particular promise, and it is clear why. Deliberative democracy’s reliance on channelling disagreement between groups into reasoned forms of decision-making, and the practical institutional tools that it elaborates toward this end, reflect both appealing and empirically promising approaches to peacemaking.

In this seminar, Prof Levy will discuss the Deliberative Peacemaking book’s final chapter, which lays out an argument for the normative and legal ‘Duty to Deliberate Before Armed Conflict’.

About the Speaker

Professor Ron Levy’s work adapts the political theory of deliberative democracy to understand how contentious constitutional problems can be better managed. He is currently co-leading (with Allison McCulloch and Ian O’Flynn) a collaborative Oxford University Press book project on Deliberative Peacemaking, which draws on more than 30 contributors from 14 countries. His past books include Deliberative Peace Referendums (Oxford University Press, 2021, with Ian O’Flynn and Hoi Kong); The Law of Deliberative Democracy (Routledge, 2016, with Graeme Orr) and The Cambridge Handbook of Deliberative Constitutionalism (Cambridge University Press, 2018, with Hoi Kong, Graeme Orr and Jeff King eds). Other works have appeared, for example, in Public Law, Global Constitutionalism, McGill Law Journal, UNSW Law Journal, Melbourne University Law Review, Public Law Review, Election Law Journal and The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy.

See more at: https://law.anu.edu.au/about/our-people/ron-levy