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There are some people in recent years who become quite optimistic about trends and conflict.

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The lowest number of conflicts ever, the least number of conflict deaths and giving a lot of kudos to the international community.

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The U.N., successful peacekeeping, etc. I'm not one of those.

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I think we have absolutely no reason to be complacent. Are the numbers can say whatever the numbers wants to want to say.

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But we know that we live in an incredibly violent world where the numbers of conflict may be very small.

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But we all know how brutalising they are, how they fracture the kinds of relationships and make the healing process so difficult.

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How they relapse, how unaccountable.

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And the fact that now we see that the burden of violence is not just restricted to the borders of countries which have,

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you know, the over 1000 deaths and about battle related deaths.

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It's much, much more pervasive now, endemic an epidemic than that across all borders.

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In fact, the latest study of the global burden of violence shows how probably, you know,

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just about a little bit over 50 percent of actual violent deaths are directly conflict related.

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And the rest of them are actually indirectly conflict related or armed violence outside of what would be defined as a political conflict.

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What's wrong? I mean, we could each of us have our list of what we find previously wrong with, I would say,

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all the three areas, conflict prevention, conflict resolution or peacemaking and peace building.

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I focus on what I think is the common factor across those three phases and which is

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particularly relevant for what we're talking about here at the grassroots aspect.

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One, I would say what's wrong is the experience and the perceptions of the actual

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populations within the countries that experience conflict is completely ignored.

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It's inconsequential or a little after part that's added in for a brief moment.

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And second, even more egregious than that, the people themselves.

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So it's not just that their experiences and perceptions are left out when the important people talk,

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but the people themselves are left out of the equation.

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They're not a part of any of those three processes, except sometimes as an afterthought or attention should part,

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which means they bought both the what what kind of conflict are we trying to avoid?

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What kind of peace are we trying to build? And the who or who is trying to prevent conflict or who is building the peace?

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It's completely faulty. It's standing on the wrong legs.

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And it means that those who are lucky enough to have benefited from the intervention and the attention of the international

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community to either have their conflict prevented invisibly as well as some of our speakers pointed out earlier,

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or lucky enough to have a peace agreement and a peace building process with a lot of

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money and international actors coming in still remain societies that are deeply divided,

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deeply fragmented. As our Phil explained yesterday in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, South Africa,

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where we saw the anti-immigrant riots just are just less than a year ago.

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It's truly across the board. Negative peace, the peace of the cemetery.

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Each of us have been there. We smelted. We felt it.

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And this is as good as it gets. And I don't want by this to lash out at or reduce the achievements of the international community.

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I consider myself a part of the international community because in most of the conflicts where I've been involved,

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all said and done, I may be dark skinned. And I've grown up in India. I have been part of one of the outsiders coming in.

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And I think to our credit, we are exceptionally good at looking from time to time and recognising our own mistakes and inadequacies.

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The problem is we are trapped within this huge machine and even when we recognise our inadequacies, we can't figure out the way out.

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How do we get out of this massive thing we've built up and do things differently?

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And I hope that this discussion will be a tiny bit of the path towards thinking off that.

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And also, I would say I would situate this whole discussion within two little moments in my life.

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The start of my journey, one could say, as a post-conflict peace, but or a conflict worker,

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which was a particular moment I was working in your part of the world.

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I was based in Ethiopia, but covering the Horn of Africa and most of African conflicts and a particular day.

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And after a mission in Somalia where I came with all my great Peary's,

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my P.H. team from Cambridge on post-conflict justice and, you know, my great belief that the problem was out there.

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And I was one of these people with a solution to fix it.

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And as I went from conflict to conflict and looked and worked with the local communities and saw what they were doing,

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I realised that we, with all our advocacy skills and with all our.

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Yes. To those higher levels of power. We're missing two critical dimensions.

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One was the main thing was we weren't appealing to or responding to the spirit of the people, as you your mom just mentioned so beautifully earlier.

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We were missing out on all that was the art, the artistic expression that often said the things that people could not dare to say in other ways.

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And we were missing out on the culture of these people by having all of our technical solutions.

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That was the beginning of my piece of my journey in this area in 2000.

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And then I situated where I was a year ago in Sri Lanka, where I was heading up local Research and Peace Institute in Art in Colombo.

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And what I saw was, you know, there was the the conflict 25 years and more reaching an incredibly terrible stage.

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And whereas before throughout this conflict, civil society, local, brilliant people from all the different areas,

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lawyers, political scientists, youth artists had been involved in trying to feed in their solutions.

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The NGO that I ran had been critical in having these groups of people sitting in a back room from different

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dimensions and seeing how about a language policy which would get people to study each other's languages.

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How about redrawing the borders? Little by little, the government had pushed them out.

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And when I think about if there is a resolution to the Sri Lankan conflict now, it will be made by the elite who prosecuted this war,

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who have been bloody minded, who have completely overshot, run roughshod over the wishes of the population.

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And all of those extraordinarily gifted people from all sectors of life.

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Right.

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Whether they are teachers, academics, women's groups, the media, all of them, the youth, the artists, the art, all of them will be left out of it.

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And you think, is this what this is about?

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I would say that the failures have been at each stage of this continuum, conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

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And I'll be very, very what's the word telegraphic in what the key figures have been in prevention.

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We figured it out for ourselves. Most of this morning and early afternoon, the key factor of the very cause,

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the plight or the primary underlying cause of conflict has been overlooked,

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which is the deep grievances and the feeling of the inability to address those grievances through legal or politically acceptable means.

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That has been brushed aside.

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So even when you look at this great attention given within the UN to the conflict prevention and the culture of prevention,

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and you look at this area of structural prevention, it's all about general development.

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General governance and general education.

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But nothing that addresses structural violence, systemic inequalities and feelings of exclusion, discrimination,

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division that come about in the society and create the fertile ground for for conflict in conflict resolution.

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We know it only too well that all of the processes and the beautiful talk by Jonathan Powell,

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which was encountered by Phil Clarke's question to him, is an example that even in the best cases,

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these are highly elite, highly exclusive, and they reinforce the reify the divisions within society,

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which is why they create the peace of the graveyard.

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And let's not forget, it's not just the negotiators on the two sides who are the elite, it's the mediators.

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I mean, it's appalling that after all these years,

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we have an accidental Covance after to the fact that today you happened to be in, you know, in a suit, in a suit.

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But they happen to be white suited men for the greater part, who negotiate the if will mediate these conflicts.

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Certainly that neither the outcome nor the process is something which can support a peacebuilding process.

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And so the peat society that needs to rebuild peace inherits not just all at the legacy of the causes of conflict,

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which were ignored, which led to violence, all of the consequences and the and the brutalities of conflict.

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But they also inherit this legacy of our failure to really resolve their conflict and to give them a piece of paper,

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which we think we've got done a great favour to them. The more important part is that that's the situation.

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How to change. How to love this. This is an excerpt from a book by a very controversial guardian academic IBT.

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Do you use it? George, I believe in Africa unchanged.

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He talks about, you know, that more than 30 peace accords have been brokered in Africa since 1970 with abysmal

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success record records because they adopted the Western approach to conflict resolution.

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He talks, he says that the cornerstone of this approach is direct face to face negotiation between warring factions.

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Then he says, Africa's own indigenous approach is different. It requires.

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For parties and arbeter, the combating parties, the civil society of those directly or indirectly affected by the conflict.

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This traditional African jurisprudence needs more emphasis on healing all the kinds of things that Skaf was telling us about earlier today.

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Restoring social harmony. Furthermore, and think about this while thinking why the kinds of processes we see today of peacemaking,

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the interest of the community surpasses those of the combatants.

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If they adopt intransigent positions, they are out.

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They don't keep getting bigger and bigger carrots just because they they declare that they will return

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to the battlefield and their militia is bigger than the guy sitting in front of him at the table.

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So how can we change this and start a different approach, which is the opposite of what we have inherited and continue to reiterate today?

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I would start at the same place that I start in all of my work on justice.

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I am always appalled and all of these years of working on post-conflict justice that we want to restore justice and build a just just peace.

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We'll be don't start with the experience of the population that suffered the conflict.

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And so we have to start at the same place, start with the population.

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And if we think about it for a moment, we can see that what happens to the population,

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the grassroots within a society that undergoes conflict to generalise to some extent as a stereotype.

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Very often a good part of them become victims in one way or the other.

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They are the direct victims, the indirect victims.

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But I would add on to that, that the whole kind of, you know, the passiveness that comes in with the direct and indirect victims,

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but also the aggressive tendencies, those who become the perpetrators. And then there are those who become either complacent.

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What this feel, there's nothing they can do.

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So they allow it to continue or those who become complicit, who become the beneficiaries are the bystanders of conflict and all of them.

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I would put within the category of the victims not to demean the victims, but to say that all of these people become sort of lose agency.

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They are being acted upon and they are not able to act to overcome their circumstances.

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But and we know this in every single society.

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And I would claim that this is a larger number that needs to be nurtured. You have the survivors and by the survivors.

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What I mean is those who threw out on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, are finding ways to innovate,

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to create, to adapt to in order simply to maintain what you would have called the inner peace,

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to find ways to be human and compassionate amidst the violence and the degrading situation that's unfolding around them.

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They're constantly referring both to their ancient culture, their cultural wisdom, as well as adapting it to cope with what's happening today,

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which is why you see this extraordinary expression of creativity in all kinds of forms,

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new forms of artistic expression, but other forms of cultural creativity which emerge in the terrain of conflict,

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which we tend to ignore because we're not looking at that.

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As you said, we're looking at the political and ignoring the cultural, the social and all the other dimensions.

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So what I propose we need, therefore, if we want to start with the population,

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is to create ways in which this year the survivor community is no longer a part or a minority or even maybe 50 percent of society.

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That becomes the overwhelming path that begins to shape the new peace.

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And for that, I say we need a two step approach, which is why I called my presentation to hew and to create.

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And by the first part, I simply mean what you said so well today in your Takar Scott, which is to make whole is the first step.

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Societies have been broken, fragmented, Moeed divisive are exclusive, both well before conflict became violent and during the process of conflict.

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And we cannot expect that it will by itself. And so we need to ensure that that healing process is done.

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So, for example, during the process, I will lead up to a peace agreement and then continue through building.

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What can we do to ensure that that which was exclusive becomes influence at the back,

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which was divided, becomes united or integrated in order to become a whole or integrated whole again?

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And the second part, but it can only come alongside or after.

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The first part is to create a new. And by that what I mean is to unleash, to nurture, to harvest and harness all of that creativity,

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the cultural, the creative and the, you know, the spiritual wisdom which is within that society.

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Of course, there is a very useful role for outsiders to play.

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But the key part, the key component for both the feeling and the creating is the people of that society and their cultural and creative wisdom,

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both of those cultural hot and refers back to their past. The creative refers to how they adapt back to the needs of the present.

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And I use the word wisdom very specifically because since the beginning of my work, I mean.

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Criticising or don't you know, if you go back to culture, I had this experience with the elders in the south of Sudan in Juba.

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I was told, how can you possibly meet with the tribal elders in Sudan?

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Because don't you know that they were the ones put in by the colonial leaders and they are the ones who advocate all of these kinds of traditions,

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which we would not support? I talk about wisdom because within all of our societies we have the inherent wisdom of what is just what is right,

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what is good, what is acceptable today and could help us to build for the future.

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I end up just seeing I think there are certain principles that emerge from this approach,

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principles which are open enough to be universal but applied in a sweet,

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generous way to each case as appropriate, which, if applied to all the three stages of peacebuilding, could really help us to see a massive change.

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It will mean crawling out of our box. It will mean shaking up on our little, you know, machinery a little bit.

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But I believe that there's absolutely no reason to stay within that anymore.

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And the cognitive dissonance, the discomfort it causes to beat us to continue that and be a part of that is so great.

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We need to step out first. Simply inclusive as opposed to exclusive integrative and bi integrated.

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I mean, not simply unifying, meaning homogenising,

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but seeing how each different part because of its diversity and difference is so important and needs to be recognised as a part of the whole.

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It means being substantive and cause oriented instead of instead of being pinned or in substantive and consequence oriented.

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We gets so much attention to the consequences, but not enough to the causes.

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It means being disinterested and impartial. The international community has the responsibility to protect.

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But it doesn't have the right to act in ways which might be perceived to be interested, self-interested or partial, which involves,

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while you're disinterested and impartial, being compassionate rather than technical and dispassionate and what you're doing.

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It means being ecological, ethical and equitable.

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All of us are appalled that not only do we ignore the terrible environmental and ecological devastation of conflict,

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but in our plans for post-conflict peace building,

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we don't really seek to redress them and bring in ways which would be as ecological as their ethical and equitable.

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But above all, it means harnessing what I started off with the creative,

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cultural and spiritual wisdom of the people within the society and allowing them to use that as the basis

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to prevent conflict in the future and to and to build peace in a way that's in accord with their cultures,

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but in accord with the needs of that present moment in their histories.

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And I can't possibly ever speak or teach without art at some point, mentioning my favourite poet, Hafeez, of Shiraz.

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And there's one particular verse of his which I think I would remember on a daily basis when I was in Sri Lanka,

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which goes, I've come into the world to see this.

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Men stopped their arms even at the arc of their reach, because they have finally realised there is but one flesh wound.

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And I think that's in a sense, our common commitment to conflict prevention and peacebuilding.

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And I wanted to send that. Thank you so much.