Peacebuilding includes activities designed to prevent conflict through addressing structural and proximate causes of violence, promoting sustainable peace, delegitimizing violence as a dispute resolution strategy, building capacity within society to peacefully manage disputes, and reducing vulnerability to triggers that may spark violence. - OECD
MOD 1: INTRODUCTION TO PEACEBUILDING, CONFLICT & VIOLENCE
- Inclusive peace accord that doesn't leave out minorities
- Both top-down & bottom-up
- Justice, security, and fundamental assistance to people who are in need, need to happen often simultaneously
- Sustained effort over decades
- Political will to build peace
- Individual violence: perpetrator & victim
- Institutional violence
- Structural violence
- Recognizing the burdens of long-term violence
- Eliciting plans from locals
- Engaging in conflict transformation
- Creating insider-outsider links (from different fields, disciplines, ...)
- Dealing with spoilers
- Identifying obstacles to strategic peacebuilding
- Sustaining a cycle of elicitation (participation) and evaluation
In 1986, 20 leading scientists from around the world examined the relevant scientific data (Ramirez, Hinde and Groebel, 1987) and issued a Statement that the evidence does not show that war is part of human nature. Paraphrasing the UNESCO Constitution and the words of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, they concluded that "Just as 'wars begin in the minds of men', peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us."
Examples of efforts:
- Boxing ring in Nigeria: Hindu & Muslim
- PeaceTech Myanmar: reduce hate speech, monks & technologists
- Network of Iraqi Facilitators
MOD 2: PEACEBUILDING APPROACHES
- Communication: Distinguish between meaning and intent versus perception. Language, actions, physical comportment, and tone of voice, ...
- Dialogue: Open-ended communication process that is meant to strengthen trust, empathy, mutual understanding, and acknowledgment.
- Negotiation: Problem solving involving parties, issue & context.
- Good offices/ conciliation: friendly intermediary that invite & support states to come to negotiation
- Mediation: Clarify issues, draft proposals, identify areas of agreement & propose alternate solutions.
- Arbitration: parties empower the third party to prepare a solution that they agree to accept
- Adjudication: third party who has authority-usually vested by a state-to make judgments or decisions on behalf of that state
- Force/ leverage: Exists when one party perceives another party or a third party to have the power and capability to carry out a threatened action
- Monitoring and witnessing, dialogue processes, reporting, education and training, advocacy, research, legal expertise, medical assistance, engineering support, environmental conservation, poverty reduction, humanitarian relief, trauma healing, or mentoring.
War: widespread, systemic violence involve >=2 parties, 1000 deaths/ year
5 peacebuilding priorities:
- Fragility: state/society contract broken
- Gov can't people’s needs: sewage, electricity, security or justice
- Gov lack legitimacy
- Resilience: ability to absorb & respond to an external shock without devolving into chaos or systematically collapsing
- most resilient nations = built accountable, inclusive systems
- Preventing Electoral Violence: more than organizing free and fair elections
- ensure communities are resilient to withstanding political rhetoric that could amplify pre-existing tensions
- police prevents violence & threats
- Countering Violent Extremism: building resilience among those populations that are vulnerable to radicalization & terrorist recruitment
- Inclusivity
- 50% of negotiated peace agreements fail within their first 5 years.
- Involving civil society reduce the chances of failure by more than half
- Agreements are 35% more likely to reach 15 years of peace when women are involved
- Psychosocial recovery of individuals & communities, healing
- Shared systems of meaning: rituals to reframe issues & invite creativity
- Solidarity among community members and appropriate distribution of resources, services and rights
- Community reintegration and trust: redefine rules, re-acceptance of rules, wrongdoers face consequences, co-exist
- Broad and inclusive forms of governance: resolve past grievances
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| The Little Book of Conflict Transformation - John Paul Lederach "Conflict as a dynamics of deescalation and escalation to pursue constructive change" |
Participatory Strategic Planning (PSP) index
- Trust-building: start with learning & research, instead of negotiation, small wins
- Local priorities: resource-mapping, convene actors around a theme, beware of hostile agendas
- Procedural rules: ensure legitimacy & inclusiveness
- Inclusiveness: avoid quotas, find representatives, invite hardliners later when project is a fact, and as personal not institutional representative
- Build coalition: train in advocacy
- Peace through strength:
- Human beings are inherently violent and that the world is a competitive place.
- Tactic: military deterrence, maintaining a balance of power, and if need be the use of force.
- Problems: costly, it’s dangerous, and doesn’t do much to address issues of trust, or lack thereof, that exists between parties in conflict.
- Peace through justice:
- Human beings have basic needs that must be met.
- Tactic: organize to meet needs, remove institutions not responsive to needs, preserve rights
- Problem: contradictory claims lead to controversy & violence
- Peace through transformation/ pacifism:
- Human beings are capable of love that can overcome feelings of hatred.
- Individuals transform their behavior patterns and belief systems, withdraw allegiance/ participation in violent systems
- Problem: no broad following, create vulnerability
- Peace through politics/ institution-building:
- Human beings are rational actors. Conflicts can be resolved by appealing to common interests.
- Set up institutions to establish Laws, treaties, facilitate negotiations
- Problem: private agendas, disagreements within the institution worsen conflicts
- Peace through sustainability:
- Human beings are both spiritually and materially connected to all others and the natural world and that it is possible to live in harmony and sustainably within that system of inter-connectedness.
- Work towards relationships based on nonviolence with ourselves, others, and the larger ecosystem
- Technological advancements that support our current way of life are dependent on the destruction of the environment. Short-term goals.
- Peace education:
- Human beings are capable of changing violent behaviors and beliefs.
- Teach alternatives to violence and expose the consequences of violence.
- Hard to measure the outcomes.
MOD 3: COMMUNICATION SKILLS
- Encourage
- Elicit
- Restate
- Summarize
- Empathize
- Reframe
Video: Sheikhs from Mahmoudiyah
Map out dynamics: identify stakeholders, spoilers, Find traction points
3-day conference: 8 Iraqi facilitators
Implementation & follow up
Never lose sight of who the beneficiaries are, and of the work you are trying to do.
Suspend what I believe
Examine, not just acknowledge differences
Share feelings & experiences and validate those of others
MOD 4: BUILDING PEACE
- When an intervention of any kind enters a context, it becomes part of that context.
- All contexts are characterized by Dividers and Connectors (Systems & institutions, Attitudes & actions, Values & interests, Experiences, Symbols & occasions)
- All interventions will interact with both Dividers and Connectors, making them better or worse.
- Interventions interact with Dividers and Connectors through their organizational Actions and the Behavior of staff.
- The details of an intervention are the source of its impacts.
- There are always Options.
- the scale problem: consider the longer horizon rather than the 3-5 year span of the project
- the weak results problem: equip field-level staff with more detailed anthropological approach and officials with more quantitative, data-driven evaluation approach
- the accountability chain: creative incentives & identify the right node in the chain that are invested in accountability
- the request for proposal problem: invite collaboration between funders & implementers, adjust winner-take-all condition to encourage continual improvement, and incorporate learning on the ground into future actions
Contact theory (bringing people together = more harmony) failed. They must do something together.
- Poor logic: assume ripple effect but no designed activities for sharing & reaching a wider community
- Don't engage key actors: often work with people who were easy to reach, and work in isolation with beneficiary groups, rather with than multiple key actors and stakeholders to the conflict
- Assume local change leads to national: e.g. peace clubs & committees
- Highlight ineffective activities: especially capacity building, people might learn to be mediators, but are not trusted/ authorized to exercise their capacity
- No conflict analysis
- No conflict sensitivity: e.g. ignore caste dynamics = worsen power imbalance, not understand people have to travel long distance to receive aid = robbery on the road
- Not coordinate among projects --> duplication
Where do you see the most growth in your understanding of peacebuilding and how will it contribute to your work? What are some areas of improvement that further learning could help strengthen?
How can you continue to develop the skills/understanding you developed in this course
- Theory of Change (TOC) as a concept is not new to me, but reading about the pitfalls of operating without one clearly articulated and evaluated TOC really revealed the shortcomings of my own project. I'm encouraged to call upon my colleagues to do a deeper conflict analysis & identify key stakeholders, instead of just focusing on capacity building (facilitation & mediation training) as we have done in the past year.
- I also sincerely want to focus on sensitivity to power dynamics, so that I don't just work with people who are easy to reach. I've found my learning edge to be engaging with more powerful actors, and escalating conflicts to pursue constructive goals. Also, I'm fascinated with the Dividers and Connectors in a conflict (Systems & institutions, Attitudes & actions, Values & interests, Experiences, Symbols & occasions). Have I not capitalize on symbols & occasions, systems & institutions effectively? Can I invest a little more energy in opening new doors?
- I have been harboring internal judgments about different strategies for peace (through justice, sustainability, transformation, strength, education & politics). It was so helpful to see them all laid out, each with potentials & limitations. I understand that I need to engage across the spectrum instead of labeling or dismissing certain groups.
US Institute of Peace
*Very engaging scenario about chieftancy & company riots in Module 1.
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