Good morning to everyone. Thank you for being here and I want to thank Liz Karmichael for organising a conference which a
director of International Peace Studies Institute is delighted to have happened here at Oxford.
Because at the Kroc Institute, part of our mandate and mission is, in fact, to advance the study of peace.
And my comments this morning are going to provide an overview of our approach at the Kroc Institute,
which is evolving over the last decade, which we call strategic peace building,
as a way to bring coherence to not only our own programmes and graduate and undergraduate teaching research and outreach, but in a way,
hopefully advance this concept in the larger field with the concept, as you'll see,
is based on a critique of the liberal peace and peace studies up to this decade.
Really? I'm going to try to.
Finish my remarks within 40 or 45 minutes, if I go a few minutes over.
You can start coughing or shouting, but please don't do that until 40 or 45 minutes.
Let me begin strategic peace building. Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in June 1975.
Twice the size of California with a population of seven million.
The new nation was plagued by poverty. A 90 percent illiteracy rate and periodic devastating droughts.
The thirty thousand Portuguese settlers who fled in the mid 1970s left the country bereft of most skilled, professional and business people.
They also took working capital and sabotaged equipment as they departed.
The economy, therefore, at independence, was in a shambles. Some Mauro Michel, the military leader of the independence movement known as for limo,
the front for the liberation of Mozambique, became the new nation's first president.
For Lemos, Marxist Leninist ideology inspired opposition in the form of the Mozambique National Resistance,
or Renamo, which was composed of former Portuguese soldiers disgruntled for limo deserters and common criminals.
Renamo launched a guerrilla war in the early 1980s directed at destabilising for limo.
By 1992,
the insurgency had left over a million Mozambicans dead and had displaced six to eight million others in a population that totalled only 14 million.
Throughout the civil war, the religious communities of Mozambique constituted the nation's civil society.
The Catholic Church, which had maintained close ties with the colonial government well into the 1960s,
grew more diversified politically during this time, with many priest supporting the Marxist for Lima leadership from the late 1970s until 80 1982.
Four Lima attempted to suppress the churches, appropriating their considerable rural assets and hounding religious actors.
State persecution served to galvanise the religious, however,
and the churches came to represent the single most influential alternative voice, an institution in the country.
The larger Mozambican religious community was divided.
However, Muslims were generally hostile toward for llamo evangelical and Pentecostal organisations recognised and supported Renamo.
The Catholic bishops issued pastoral letters condemning atrocities committed by both sides and calling for negotiations.
Relations between the governments and the religious groups improved markedly between 1981 and 1988,
the period when the United States provided 240 million dollars in primarily humanitarian aid to the Ferlito government.
This policy had its intended effect.
In 1983, Mozambique began to allow its NGOs, such as the private relief agency, care to operate and Mozambique move toward a less centralised economy.
The government could no longer deny that the churches were providing essential social services,
such as the distribution of food and clothing, education and health care, which the state itself was an eight was unable to supply.
During the war with Renamo Renamo, the Mozambique churches were able to draw on an international religious network
of social services and to channel desperately needed assets into Mozambique.
In addition, the church has maintained its infrastructure in the rural areas, despite the ravages of the civil war.
State officials often had to rely on religious groups for information about rebel controlled areas.
In time, the horrendous condition of the economy and the depredations of the civil war itself forced for Lima
to reconsider its policies and seek the cooperation of any group willing to help the conflict end.
In this context, the Roman Catholic community of Sant'Egidio took on a major role in hosting and
mediating the complex negotiations that eventually led to the end of the Civil War.
What element of what I'll be calling strategic peace building did this transnational organisation of lay Catholic professionals bring to the setting?
I'd like to remember that, Van. I'm going to present a few more short ones and then analyse them through this lens of strategic peace building.
So Mozambique is the first with this community of Sant'Egidio and in the presence of the various churches and religious bodies.
Secondly, second vignette in 2006, following the election of Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia,
representatives of the government opened a process to demobilise the paramilitary structure in the war torn nation.
In the long history of government insurgent negotiations,
different administrations had asked the Catholic bishops and their support staff to provide oversight,
good offices and guarantees of safety and integrity and occasional facilitation of talks as the new initiative took shape.
Church leadership faced questions regarding what role it would play in the process,
specifically the role of paramilitaries in the long history of human rights abuses
in Colombia and their proximity to government actors generated widespread concern,
as did the prospect of an endgame scenario, which, hidden under the umbrella of peace process and reconciliation,
would fail to address the need for truth, justice and reparations. In this context,
the ethics of building peace came into stark contrast with the pragmatics of negotiation and the dismantling of an armed organisation.
Victim communities affected by paramilitary para militarism communities that the church had
accompanied in some regions expressed anxiety about the process and the church's role in it.
They feared renewed violence and worried and worried whether they had received the acknowledgement and reparations they deserved.
Not least the victimised communities felt pressure to engage in reconciliation.
But what, they asked, does reconciliation mean in such a context?
The situation became even more complex in light of the fact that the church was also,
at the time engaged and on again, off again negotiations with armed insurgencies on the left.
In addition, local parishes were supporting communities of internally displaced displaced persons and helping to maintain fledgling.
Songs that have been declared at grassroots level in at least three different regions of Colombia.
So we ask, what would a street what did a strategic peace building perspective offer to the Catholic Church as it
attempted to balance these competing claims and build peace in the context of a 50 year civil war?
Third vignette in August 2008,
a historic peace accord in Mindanao between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the government of the Philippines nearly reached fruition.
The result of seven years of negotiation facilitated facilitated by the Malaysian government.
A document called the Memorandum of Agreement on Enns on Ancestral Domain had survived
numerous iterations and stages of mutual consensus building in the last push.
Following the initialling of this yet to be signed negotiating document, a divided Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.
Immediately, a variety of international civil society and local actors lodged protests and encouraged the
negotiators to salvage the historic opportunity to end conflict that traces its roots across centuries.
In the largest southern most island of the archipelago, the negotiators ask how might the resources and methods provided by a strategic
peacebuilding approach sustain the negotiation process at a time of crisis?
Finally, several groups working in Nogales were half the city is located on the Arizona side of the border.
And the other half in Mexico have identified their need for help from some party who can view the situation comprehensively.
See the big picture? Identify a path forward and facilitate a common approach to local issues.
They've recruited peacebuilders to the scene. Such groups are not alone.
Borders in many countries create interdependent communities living in close proximity.
While the policies that regulate migration are formulated thousands of miles away in national capitals,
the economic globalisation that creates flows of capital and workforces underscores the artificiality of maps and mocks pretensions to sovereignty.
Workers and their families are buffeted about by the economic and social hurricane.
We are not an open war, but we have got a mess on our hands.
They say. Does what? I'll be defining as strategic peace building.
Offer a rebel relevant analysis,
diagnosis and paths to constructive change to provide to people caught in the crossfire of immigration and the globalisation of economies.
Those are my four vignettes. The most recent generation in global politics might well be called The Age of Peace Building.
Given the intense, diverse and global wave of efforts to end the violence and colossal injustices of civil war,
genocide, dictatorship and large scale poverty, and to foster justice and prosperity in their stead since 1988,
the United Nations has undertaken peace building operations in revolutionary number and frequency each year since then,
increasing the number of interventions since the end of the Cold War,
an unprecedented number of civil wars have entered through negotiated settlements.
A third wave of democracy, beginning in 1974 has seen some 80 societies move toward human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
Everyone, it seems, from the U.N. to the World Bank to the World Social Forum to relief and development agencies,
has pursued ambitious quest to end poverty and resolve conflict.
In this mill, you transitional justice has become a global pursuit involving national trials, vetting practises, international criminal tribunals,
a permanent international criminal court, over 30 truth commissions,
an outbreak of reparations and public apologies and sometimes even forgiveness in the political realm.
Western states have struggled to establish security and the rule of law and sites of violence and anarchy.
The United States in Somalia, Afghanistan, in Iraq, Germany and Afghanistan and the European Union and Kosovo and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Just to mention a few human rights organisations, religious institutions,
tribal elders and citizens of domestic societies have sought to resolve and transform conflict in innovative ways as well.
But if this montage of energy is describes a trend, so too it evokes urgent questions.
Are are all of these efforts truly ones of building peace which have been successful?
Under what conditions have they been successful, which are just by what criteria do some of these efforts affect others positively or negatively?
Most of all are their concepts, doctrines or paradigms that tell us how peacebuilding ought to be pursued.
The dominant paradigm to date has been the liberal peace paradigm dominant and that it pervades the
most powerful and prestigious institutions and governments who take on the work of peace building.
The aims of the liberal peace are simple to end armed violence, to establish human rights, democracy and market economies,
its intellectual provenance is the liberal tradition that arose from the Western Enlightenment.
It envisions the United States at the United Nations outside intervening states,
state governments and oppositional factions undertaking mediation, military intervention,
war settlement disarmament, election monitoring, refugee risk resettlement,
and the creation of free government institutions, free markets and a free media.
A cardinal virtue of the liberal of prete peace approach is finitude.
When will this operation end? Yet at the Kroc Institute and elsewhere in the world of scholarship on peace,
peace building practitioners have testified consistently and in an increasingly insistent voice.
The liberal peace paradigm is far too narrow.
No one, of course, rejects human rights, democracy, economic growth or even the United Nations.
But the building of peace, they argue, is far wider, deeper and more encompassing and involves a greater array of actors, activities,
levels of society, links between societies and time horizons than the dominant paradigm recognises or accounts for or integrates.
It involves the U.N. That is what's actually happening.
The building of peace involves the U.N. carrying out sanctions against terrorist groups in a way that promotes good governance,
human rights and economic development in the countries where sanctions are targeted.
It involves also coordinating the international prosecution of war criminals with the need to
settle the civil war and the efforts of local cultures and leaders to bring peace as well.
It involves educating the children of the societies next generation so as to transform their hatred into tolerance and even friendship.
It involves NGOs and civil society, as well as ethnic and religious actors who are all but ignored in the liberal peace paradigm.
It involves combating inequalities that are embedded in global structures of power and wealth.
It involves trials, truth, commissions and reparations, but also apology, forgiveness and tribal rituals of reconciliation.
Not only is the broad range of these players practises and periods crucial for achieving sustainable peace.
But each is linked to others through cause and effect. For better and worse,
I have statistics I'll be happy to share with you on the limited success of peace building
operations and into civil wars and the short time period before violence recurs,
especially when the peace building operation is of limited duration. That is, there's a direct correlation between the time spent on site,
in the conflict set, in conflict setting and the sustainability of the peace process.
Many fail eventually, in part because it's a parachute in parachute operation.
Effective peace building, therefore, aims to strengthen these ligatures of interdependence, accenting,
deepening and synchronising them and linking them further with the efforts of governments and
international institutions and with the broad project of building a just peace and in between societies.
Any particular effort at strengthening this longer term process we might call a strategy of peace at its core,
such peace building nurtures constructive human relationships to be relevant.
It must do this strategically. That is at every level of society and across the potentially polarising lines of ethnicity, class, religion and race.
This presentation that this current presentation is just an attempt to give a brief introduction to an emerging approach to deadly conflict.
This approach known as strategic peacebuilding,
which is the capacity to recognise and develop strategies to maximise the impact of initiatives for constructive change within a globalised M.
You. I'm delighted that Oxford University Press has established a series on strategic peacebuilding.
The first volume of which will appear this fall that Dan Philpott is editing.
And John Paul Lederach and I are the editors of a series. That volume is called Strategies of Peace.
And it provides a much fuller explication of what I'm presenting here, as well as several case studies.
Strategic peace building, therefore, denotes an approach to reducing violence,
resolving conflict and building peace that is marked by a heightened awareness of
and skilled adaptation to the complex and shifting material Jela geopolitical,
economic and cultural realities of our increasingly globalised and interdependent world.
Accordingly, peace building that is strategic draws intentionally and shrewdly on the overlapping and imperfectly coordinated presidents presences,
activities and resources of various international, transnational, national, regional and local, regional and local institutions,
agencies and movements that influence the causes, expressions and outcomes of conflict.
Strategic peacebuilders take advantage of emerging and already established patterns of collaboration and interdependence.
For the purpose of strategically thinking about ways to coordinate these agencies.
For the purpose of reducing violence and alleviating root causes of deadly conflict.
The Strategic Peace Builder encourages the deeper and more frequent convergent convergence of mission, resources, expertise,
insight and benevolent self-interest that characterises the most fruitful multilateral collaboration in the cause of peace.
Hoping that it's not a quixotic task, we at the Kroc Institute are educating our undergraduates,
master's students and P.H. D students and the ability to analyse a conflict situation holistically and to understand
different levels of society that might be resources in addressing long term peace building in that society.
That is, we're attempting to teach them to think like strategic peacebuilders.
How have elements of this approach emerged in the post-Cold War world?
Who are the relevant partners in this enterprise? What types of skill and training are central to strategic peace building?
There are certain hallmarks of the constructive relationships that strategic peace builders seek to foster amongst conflicted peoples.
These include the cultivation of interdependence as a social and political context for the effective pursuit of human rights,
good government, good governance and economic prosperity,
the promotion of transparent communication across sectors and levels of society in the service of including as many voices and actors as possible,
and the reform of institutions and the repair or creation of partnerships
conducive to the common good and the increasing coordination and where possible,
the integration of resources, programmes, practises and processes.
These hallmarks characterise the reflective practise of peace builders themselves who think and act strategically.
You might ask fairly of what uses it to even engage in the exercise of conceptualising peace building in this its most capacious meaning.
Lederach, Philipot and I take this ideal type approach for three reasons why conceptualise it this broadly?
First, many, if not all elements of this definition and description of peacebuilding do,
in fact appear already in the actual peace building activities and operations around the world.
All of them appear in all of them together, appear in these activities collectively considered,
and all of them are successful to the central building of peace.
In short, this term, this concept adds nothing to the array of activities and aspirations already associated here and there with the making,
keeping and building of peace. Second, this kind of comprehensive approach to peace building is necessary if peace being built is to be sustained,
sustained over time, a sustainable peace.
The historical record clearly shows requires long term ongoing activities and operations that may be initiated and supported for a time by outsiders,
but must eventually become the ordinary practises of the citizens and institutions of the society in question.
How better to help the transition between various levels of external actors and local actors to sustain the peace?
We believe further that peace building occurs in it's fully realised mode when it addresses every stage
of the conflict cycle and involves all members of society in the non-violent transformation of conflict.
The pursuit of social justice. And the creation of cultures of sustainable peace.
Properly understood. The building and sustaining of a culture of peace and its supporting institutions requires a range of
relationship building activities encompassing the entire conflict cycle rather than merely the post accord.
Coming out of violence, period.
Accordingly, activities that constitute peace building run the gamut of conflict transformation, including violence prevention and early warning.
Conflict management, mediation and resolution. Social reconstruction.
And working with trauma in the aftermath of armed conflict, as well as the long, complex work of reconciliation throughout the process.
In addition, peace building theory articulates the end goal of these disparate but interrelation interrelated phases of conflict transformation,
which might be best expressed by the idea of a just peace,
a dynamic state of affairs in which the reduction and management of violence
and the achievement of social and economic justice are undertaken as mutual,
reinforcing dimensions of constructive change. The sustainable transformation of conflict requires more than the necessary problem-solving associated
with mediation or with negotiated settlements and other elements of conflict resolution persay.
It requires the redress of legitimate grievances and the establishment of new relations characterised
by equality and fairness according to the dictates of human dignity and the common good.
To say that a just peace is the end goal of strategic peace building is not to suggest that
peace building ends when the fundamental requirements of a just situation are established.
Rather, the practises of peacebuilding that helped to bring about this desired state of affairs must then become routinised in the society.
For example, effective institutions for participatory government, once established, require continual oversight, nurturing and renewal.
Part of the rationale for conceptual peacebuilding in this comprehensive sense is a recognition
that conflict does occur in a cycle that each phase of the cycle is related to the others,
and that efforts toward a sustainable peace much must address each phase of the cycle.
In the context of the overall conflict. Accordingly, efforts toward prevention, for example, should not be confined to one temporal period.
That is, before the violence occurs.
In most societies, some level of violence has already occurred amongst the belligerents and is in a cyclical process.
Rather, systemic efforts toward the prevention of further violence should be prominent at every stage of the conflict,
including the peace process and the post settlement implementation period.
And these efforts must be present in a self considered way, a self-conscious way.
They often do happen almost serendipitously. That is ad hoc in relationship to the outbreak of violence.
But there has not been yet a thought through sustained notion of prevention that spread
throughout the entire peace process and how that prevention might be continually implemented.
Each of the tools available to a peace builder must be applied in the context of the situation.
For example, efforts to prevent the recurrence of violence after a period of state oppression or
civil war which often occurred while a negotiated settlement is being implemented,
will require a particular and somewhat different set of skills than the efforts undertaken
to prevent an unprecedented outbreak of deadly violence in a society simmering with ethnic,
religious or political tensions but not yet plunged into war.
Nonetheless, prevention must unfold at every stage. The building of a constructive personal group and political set of relationships is perpetual,
occurring as a constitutive part of prevention, negotiation, transitional justice and problem resolution.
Third, an ideal type definition of peace building offers the advantage of identifying the distance between the current scope,
scale and transformative impact of efforts to end violence and peace and build peace on the one hand.
This is between that and the fullest possible realisation of peace building potential on the other.
When our definition, therefore includes a prescriptive dimension,
we believe that the greater potential can be realised by envisioning peace building, conceptualising it as this holistic enterprise,
a comprehensive and coherent set of actions and operations that can be improved, made more effective by greater levels of collaboration,
complementary coordination and where possible, integration across levels of a society.
In short, a comprehensive definition of sustainable peace building, if widely adopted,
would stimulate the further realisation of the comprehensive reality of sustainable peace.
Time has been the stumbling block of several otherwise savvy or at least well intended interventions.
This robust definition of peace building incorporates the often bitter lessons
of various cases learnt from interventions or non interventions such as Rwanda,
Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Rigaud, regarding the critical importance of getting both the timing and the duration of interventions right.
A lack of clarity about the end goal of such interventions. Clouds Planners Thinking about timing and duration.
Professional peacebuilding builders well aware that a comprehensive and sustainable approach
takes significantly more time and commitment than governments and intergovernmental agencies.
Typically, a lot might subscribe to a modified form of Colin Powell's dictum.
If it's broke, they might say, who cares who broke it?
We're going to try to fix it. And fixing it, they realise, requires strategic thinking about how to forge the proper collaborative, local,
national and transnational alliances and movement to movement person to person relationships
that will be needed over a sustained period to build something even approaching a just peace.
We come to this conclusion after listening to testimony of peace builders who have observed and
consulted in setting of sustained violence across millions and millions of miles and dozens of years,
my collaborator in this presentation, John Paul Lederach, has spent 30 years on the ground in Somalia,
Nepal, the Basque country, Northern Ireland, Colombia, around the world as a mediator and a reconciler.
And he points out that the period at times,
the period of time it takes to effectively accompany a society out of a protracted period of deadly violence,
achieves stability and move toward a stable peace, will take at least as long as it took the conflict to gestate, turn violent and run its course.
Such sobering considerations might give pause to politicians and policymakers, potential donors,
intergovernmental organisations and other other critical contributors to any peace building
operation that would be planned according to the requirements of this comprehensive definition.
Presumably, no one, no one wants to sink into what looks like a quagmire,
which is how long term interventions within bloody borders far from home have been depicted.
So how does one go about building the political will necessary to compel governments and other players to expand
the time horizon of their commitment to partial responses will begin a larger discussion of this crucial question.
First, one can't objective course the fact that states and intergovernmental agencies act in their own interest.
Yet we are encouraged by the growing realisation by powerful actors ranging from major foundations to the European Union that smart investment
in carefully plan and coordinating peacebuilding operations is in fact in their own long term interest because it's more effective.
Given the increasingly interdependent environment and the reluctance to reinvest.
Over and over again in the same conflict setting,
this interdependence can be seen most vividly in current debates in places like Nogales, Colombia and Mozambique about immigration.
Displaced populations and the strain put on both the international and local communities as people seek survival from hotbeds of conflict.
This is only predicted to increase when we consider the coming impact of environmentally driven conflicts,
particularly over issues like access to and use of water and land.
As the case of Mendenhall's indigenous peoples suggests that one of those early vignettes that awareness of the
utility of carefully plan and coordinating peacebuilding operation brings us to a second beginning response,
initial response to the scepticism. How do we best attempt to ensure that peacebuilding operations fulfil their
potential by leading societies to the threshold of a just and stable peace?
Our answer, in a word, is that we do our best to ensure that strategic planning and performance informs these operations.
What we mean by strategic, I'll lay out very briefly and we can hopefully talk later.
Today,
it is necessary to think strategically and to challenge the conventional understanding of peacebuilding by calling practitioners to be more strategic.
What has changed? Why is it necessary that now we must think strategically?
What has changed? The end of the Cold War opened the field not only for the explosion of various kinds of regional and local wars,
but also for the intervention already of a dizzying array of international and transnational government and non-governmental actors.
The problems facing 21st century societies are and are no longer, if ever they were,
contained within national boundaries or susceptible to solutions based on one way of knowing and assessing the world.
One of my hobby horses is the exclusion in so many of these processes of ethnic and religious local actors.
We just hire an anthropologist at Kroc who works on reintegration of militias
into Sierra Leone and analyses that reintegration from an anthropological lens.
How did how does the kinship network work? How to elders accept young guerrillas back into society?
If we don't understand the local knowledge, the epistemology of the local.
We won't get the U.N. operation right.
Indeed, we can identify for insights about contemporary conflicts that help us rethink peace building and fashioning as a strategic enterprise.
First, the players have multiplied. In the post-Cold War era, a wider range of actors and institutions have mattered.
Recalling my opening vignettes, for example, consider the variety of religious, civil, non-governmental,
academic, legal and other actors that were necessary to end the Mozambique's civil war,
to advance the peace process in Mindanao and to mediate between the military, the paramilitaries, the victimised groups and the rebels in Colombia.
While most of these players had already been on the scene in various capacities for many years,
the changing nature of the conflicts themselves and the geopolitical power struggles suddenly required new kinds of participation by them.
That is by a wide range of non official and non-governmental actors. No longer was peacemaking the exclusive purview of governments and states.
In short, a traditional liberal peace approach to conflict resolution in contemplating root causes
and structural change tended to take the nation state as the primary unit of analysis.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, the framing question became how do we adjust the scope,
scale and priorities of peace building in order to incorporate this much wider range of actors more formally and conscientiously in auditioners?
In addition, practitioners of On the ground peacebuilding began to realise that deadly conflicts, if they are to be transformed,
require multiple points of analysis and multiple perspectives and multiple agents of intervention in order to create sustainable change.
Accordingly, peace builders began to seek strategic alliances and coordination over the longer term, rather than merely a negotiated resolution.
In this regard, a second framing question for the inchoate practise of strategic peacebuilding has emerged.
How do we design processes that envision conflict as the opportunity for wider, constructive social change?
So how do do peace processes become reconceptualize as the basis for constructive social change that will end in preventing violence?
Because they introduce a greater level of equality and justice and so on.
Third, the field of play was enlarge to encompass and linked to previously unlink spheres of action, the local and the global.
At the local level, the capacity and need for communities to activate and mobilise resources to face the realities of internal conflicts rose sharply.
It was impossible to think about peace over the last 20 years without engaging, including and respecting the local community.
Practitioners specialise in the dynamics of peacebuilding within the boundaries and on the terms set by the local communities.
But they also recognised that the local communities themselves already exist within that exist within national and global context.
Accordingly, peacebuilders, especially during the course of the last two decades,
have become more experienced in cultivating and applying human and material resources both within and beyond the local community.
Peacebuilding practises, thus becoming is thus becoming an interdisciplinary, local, global expertise driven approach to building sustainable peace.
Striking the right balance is a delicate and difficult business between the local and the global.
The relationship between three distinctive transformative processes at the heart of peace building that is striving for social justice,
ending violent conflict and building healthy, co-operative relationships in conflict ridden societies.
That relationship is complex. These processes of transformation are interrelated most fundamentally at the local level.
Even when violence originates and occurs at the national or regional level, its impact is felt most keenly and directly in neighbourhoods,
towns, villages, cities and local communities to violate the principle of subsidiarity.
By moving too quickly beyond the most immediate community of concern and agency to national or regional actors as
agents of conflict management is to undermine any hope of genuine resolution and the transformation of most conflicts.
One cannot ignore the local bringing representatives of these warring sides to peace.
Talk typically requires concerted effort by those wielding high levels of political and social authority.
But they cannot replace cultural agents,
including religious and ethnic actors who operate on the local level and who will be interpreting the agreements
and preparing the societies for their implementation and for the transition called for by the agreements.
On the other hand,
the proliferation of transnational social movements for global local justice influenced peace studies scholar practitioners to think beyond borders,
to locate both the causes of conflict and the potential change agents both within and beyond the nation states.
The nation state, meanwhile, as you know, has come under considerable pressure from above the international community and from
below the local communities and from across demand for autonomy at the regional level.
This principle of indigenous empowerment suggests that conflict transformation must actively invision include,
respect and promote the human and cultural resources from within a given setting.
The setting and the people cannot be seen as the problem and the outsider as the answer.
Rather, the long old, total, long term goal of transformation demands that external agents of change take as the primary task of accompaniment,
the validation of the people and the expansion of the resources within that setting.
In this regard,
the framing question posed by and for strategic peace builders has become how do we build the global movement for justice on a global level,
while at the same time in empowering the voice and capacity of local communities?
Finally, a paradigm shift came with the understanding that peacebuilding requires more than the management of the conflict,
the reduction of violence or simple agreement on some political issues.
Peacebuilding must also in some way address the healing of peoples scarred and alienated
by the lived experience of sustained violence in their communities and nations.
Healing increasingly is understood not as a post-conflict form of therapy,
but rather a precondition for the prevention of renewed conflict and the transformation of destructive social and structural patterns.
Promoting reconciliation and healing as the Senate qua non of peacebuilding is predicated upon a hard won
awareness that violent conflict creates deep disruptions in relationships that then need radical healing.
The kind of healing that restores the soul, the psyche and the moral imagination.
Such healing, it is now recognised, draws on profound, rational psychological and spiritual resources.
It's preferred modalities are therefore symbolic, cultural and religious.
The deepest personal and social spheres which directly and indirectly shape the national and political spheres.
The framing question here has thus become how do we heal broken humanity?
The builders of a comprehensive and sustainable peace engage each of these four questions.
Consider our opening vignettes. How do we adjust the scope, scale and priorities of peace building in order to incorporate a wider range of actors?
The community of Sant'Egidio in the resolution of Moa's Mozambique's Civil War is by now a classic example of track two diplomacy blooming into track,
one of an outsider who is also a partial insider,
centage judo, providing good offices and international resources and can and connexions conducive to moving
the negotiations from phase to phase and of coordinating and empowering different actors.
That is, Sant'Egidio was thinking strategically. I have more on this, but I'll save it for later.
Moving on to the second vignette. The link between the concern for expanding the range of actors and the next to question relating
to ways of affecting larger social change and pursuing justice is embedded in the vignette
describing the decisions of civic leaders and officials in the city of Nogales to invite extra
local peacebuilders to assist in the conceptualisation of the region's challenges and solutions.
The leaders of Nogales recognise that the local issues confronting them,
including the patterns of migration as they affect the composition of the workforce,
the health of the local economy and the respective rights and obligations of immigrants and citizens are also inevitably regional,
national and indeed global issues.
A complicated pattern that is being replicated in thousands of borderland communities around the world, not unlike Nogales.
The strategic peace builder in such cases is not only a co-ordinator, a network builder, but a comparative list.
She draws on knowledge of national and international law on contacts in a variety of
professional fields and on the experience of other communities in similar contexts.
Yet she also depends heavily, of course, on the local wisdom and experience of the people of Nogales.
A project research project we're conducting at KROK with Uppsala in Sweden is of this type.
And and as was mentioned last night, every conflict is unique unto itself.
But we still can gain a lot from comparative processes. So we've established a living database called the Peace Accord Matrix that analyses the
different dimensions of 40 comprehensive peace accords signed since the end of the Cold War.
On questions like decommissioning of arms or reintegration of soldiers and so forth,
sustained analysis of what happened in each of these conflicts that's alive.
Database for conflict negotiators on the ground.
So how did Northern Ireland handle decommissioning? What were the twists and turns?
It won't apply to SRI. Apply to Sri Lanka specifically. But some of the patterns and insights might be useful.
The skills needed for strategic peacebuilding and increasingly honed and named as such by a range of
professional professionals trained in one or more variety of disciplines and areas of expertise.
For example, we have peace studies, colleagues around the world who are who are specialising in particular aspects of peacebuilding.
I have two more quick questions and I'll be finished. How do we design processes that envision conflict?
Is the opportunity for wider, constructive social change? My third question and another vignette.
How do we build a colonial movement for justice while also empowering local communities?
Consider the example of Mindanao in that case.
As in most, the most prominently visible aspect of peacebuilding has been the high level negotiations that took place.
Equally crucial, although less understood and covered by the media, was the wider context of activities,
roles and initiatives that provide an infrastructure for constructive change in Mindanao.
A short list of these external actors I'm are actors that are not the elite level would include a decade of grass
roots initiatives that built relationships in local communities across the important divisions amongst Muslim,
Christian and indigenous groups. Education and training programmes in conflict,
transformation and peacebuilding that were undertaken during this seven year period that reached a wide range of civil society actors
and created important linkage between local peace builders and the representatives of both Philippines National Army and the M ILF.
The careful, nurturing and development of ever widening civil society networks dedicated to human rights such as
the Peace Wevers Coalition in Mindanao with an active constituency of more than 20 organisations.
The commitment on the part of the government to create a national office to
sustain and coordinate the peace efforts beyond a particular administration.
The initiation and commitment on the part of religious leaders to develop the Bishop
Bullimore conference that has met on a regular basis in Mindanao for more than a decade.
A sustained and long term funding by a range of international donors to build
local capacity and institutional platforms for local and regional organisations.
And finally, the commitment on the part of Malaysia to slowly but surely negotiate the basis of the document over the course of seven years.
At the point of the collapse of negotiations, violence rose sharply and trust decreased amongst the players in the formal process.
At the same time, however, the web of relationships mobilised within and around Mindanao,
sets of relationships between a variety of different actors that had not existed a decade ago.
For example, those between civil society actors and militaries on both sides.
Negotiators and the concern international community.
These webs of relationships began to coordinate a response to the emergency of the communities affected by the renewed violence.
These unofficial but critical actors mobilised conferences within and outside Mindanao that put forward numerous
proposals for reinitiating negotiations and the beginnings of wider consultations that moved from local to higher levels.
So far, the outcome regarding this final agreement is unknown,
but the infrastructure of a multiplicity of actors engaged in a common concern has function in ways unthinkable a decade earlier.
What is clear is that that the final, most visible aspects of the process, the formal negotiations,
rest on the courage and creativity not only of the negotiators, but also of the wider set of relationships,
activities and initiatives that are needed to sustain the peaceful transformation of a social,
religious, economic and political conflict that traces its roots across centuries.
I can say more about my other examples of Columbia and the multiplicity of actors and the role of the church in Columbia.
But I fear I've already looked on over a little bit of my time. And I'll be happy to discuss more of this in time for discussion later.
Thanks for your attention.