It is both a pleasure and an enormous honour to moderate this first session.
We have two very distinguished speakers Professor John Paul, Little Rock and Dr. Tanya Patterson host.
I'm not going to provide details about their biographies.
You will find those very well laid out in the programme.
But I just want to emphasise that these are two individuals who, in my humble opinion, at least have made very, very significant contributions,
both to the ways that we think about peace, peacebuilding, peacemaking,
mediation and also both have been very much engaged in practise in very, very significant ways.
So we're very fortunate to have them both with us today to offer reflections.
In one case, as I understand, looking back and in another case, looking forward,
although I expect it will probably get a mixture of both with each of them.
So I invite you both to join on the podium here and then I'll yield the floor John Paul to you first.
And I do that, it's just it's easy. Yeah, thank you.
Good morning, everybody. This is, in fact, my first post-COVID meeting,
so it's wonderful to be in person with all of you and having not done this for about
three years where I could basically sit in my pyjamas and talk to people from Zoom.
I actually don't know if my talk is 20 minutes or 50, so we'll we'll see how it goes.
I'd like to start this by telling a little story.
About two books that I don't think you've ever read and that I never actually wrote sort of.
And that appeared for a while and then disappeared.
And there is something significant in that process that I think launches our topic today about who builds peace.
So. Without further ado.
This is the book cover. If you can take a close look, it's a little puzzle like you might get in the paper.
What's different between this book cover? And this book cover.
I wrote this manuscript beginning in the late 1980s.
It took some time to reach publication, and when it came back to me the very first time, it came in the version that you saw first.
And I was stunned to see that my title had been edited. I had not used the word development.
It was the word reconciliation.
And as I went through the book, I discovered that a lot of my concepts had been completely edited out and placed into a different language.
When I called the next morning, the editor was quite deeply surprised and had not realised that that had happened.
And they pulled the first book and delivered the second one without by changing the title,
without changing the other things in the book that had been edited.
Significance, it's hard to know. They say that sometimes the hardest movement is from category zero to one.
Clearly, the word reconciliation.
Made no sense in the world of the early 1990s, dominated primarily, I think, by modalities of conflict resolution and approaches to agreements.
This is probably. The one that you're more familiar with.
Came out in roughly the mid to late 1990s.
Sustaining reconciliation was for me,
part of the challenge that I was after in wanting to place as a centrepiece of the work that we do in peacebuilding.
The notion that it is about relationships. It is about the way that we understand them and see them.
So. As I was preparing this particular talk, I started to go back and look at the evolutions of my own thought in reference to the title.
And so I'm going to share a fourth book title here with you.
My guess is this is really going to get ancient because this was the title of my dissertation.
That blue book in the middle. I'm sure none of you have seen that one of Metz Nails and Proclaimers was kind
of an everyday view of conflict in the language of conflict in Central America,
which was in the period of the 1980s where I spent most of my time.
Since very few of you will probably be familiar with this and no book was written out of the dissertation other than a short, small one in Spanish.
Let me share the three concepts that set centre in this book.
They basically were what I call the TNT of peace building.
That was the English translation, if you will, of three terms that were quite common within the Spanish confianza and in real and thorough.
For those of you that are Spanish speaking trust.
Hard to translate the term in rhythm, but some form of tangled networks, entanglements and timing.
None of those terms actually do justice to it, so let me try to walk through a bit of this.
Let's take in though, as an example and radio is built on a is built on a fishing net metaphor to be in real or to be tangled up.
Red is the word that they use in Spanish for net and for networking.
And if you can see here.
People that work with Nets have to work with a spectacular capacity to hold a great deal of not complexity and often in the use of nets,
a great deal of balance in Israel, you had a concept that conflict was like a tangled mess that required very careful, very careful repair.
And the stitching and the repair, the re bring the bringing back together of what had been torn when it was placed into its.
Point of purpose when it was working again, it remains a knotted hole, still somewhat of a tangle.
The Connexions are constant. Peace building here would be understood as untangling and repairing.
Once home, the net remains knotted.
Connected in order to serve purpose. Take the word coin Doura, which is, in essence, a kind of a reading of the moment.
What moment are we in? What's the current circumstances that we're in, the ability to read time and space held together?
Within that, it's absolutely critical to have a sense of place relationships, history and the emergent future.
Those are all held in reading the moment, if you will.
Local context remains absolutely key and grounding without it.
Navigation through the maps cannot be easily found.
Take confianza as an example. Confianza is trust, essentially, but it's much more layered in Spanish than we often attribute to the word in English.
And certainly more layered than the professionalised, often instrumentalized notion of a mediator, for example, role acceptance as a form of trust.
Trust is basically embedded within an understanding of relationships.
In the context that I was in the 1980s,
it led into the notion of the inside partial approaches to handling situations of conflict rather than bringing people who were outside and neutral,
which was the more dominant figure of the mediation. The inside partial was based on the ability to navigate a whole series of networks in
relationships that permitted small sets of people to bridge what had become massive divides,
but from within the context where they lived.
I imagine if we looked at these three concepts, what you would find are really three keys, one is the significance of context.
The second is the significance of Connexions.
And the third is relationships as forming a web of resources for finding a way forward by way of often very patient stitching of mutual humanity.
Those were the things I was finding in the everyday language of people when they talked about the situations of conflict that they were experiencing.
I start in part with this view of in radio and hear a massive net of someone's sitting in the middle of it,
in part because it also helps me situate a bit of the topic that we're going into.
But also my place within that as a practitioner scholar.
Which over the years I've placed those two in that relationship practitioner scholar, I come from a messy tradition of participant observation,
qualitative research of being a part of something and understanding yourself as a participant while
you at the same time try to both observe what unfolds and reflect on the emergent that is coming.
While it is still in its unfolding. Over time, I noticed this about my messiness.
I basically never said the same thing twice about any of the things that I experienced.
My language was in a constant evolution of trying to find something that didn't quite exist.
Maybe a little like the fact that sustainable development matched the language of officialdom,
but sustainable reconciliation was so foreign that it had to be translated back into what was known.
I have found this to be a constant search for what is both elusive and impermanent,
violent conflict by my experiences is filled with so many things that are lived, observed and experienced.
But that we have in adequate language to fully describe peacebuilding in many regards, is a mystery mystery in the midst of that messiness.
It's a journey to enter in and sit with and then try to name the unspeakable.
And that has been both in my experience, both a delight and a dilemma.
That seemingly poses for us a number of paradoxes.
So going back these last few weeks in preparation for coming here and reviewing my own work, I noticed for evolutions that I'd like to share with you.
The great advantage of being a true scientist is you never hold your theories.
Too tight, hold them lightly. They're not exactly like your children that you have to run around and protect.
Knowledge building is the ability to notice that things are stated and observed in ways that they appear.
But with time, they evolve. So here are some evolutions.
The first for me comes around the paradox of complexity, which was what I was experiencing primarily in the 1980s.
And in that evolution, I recall a very particular conversation 1990.
Soon after, I had returned from an intensive decade of engagement within the civil wars,
primarily in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and a researcher came to my office, I think, from Germany.
I can't recall exact location. She was writing a piece.
It wasn't Tanya unless she tells me afterwards that was me. I think we met.
Later, it started sliding. But this person posed me the question of the conference today.
This is 1990. So it means that this question has been haunting us for a while.
Who builds peace? What's your theory? What's your approach? And what I did, which is fairly typical to my way of talking.
If I can see it, I can understand it. If I can't see it, I can't understand it.
So I took out a napkin. We were sitting in a snack shop having the coffee, took out a napkin, and I started what I call the napkin doodle.
And I started by drawing this little pyramid. And essentially, what I said was,
I have just come from a decade of experiences where most of my time was spent in communities that have been absolutely destroyed by war.
They are deeply divided locally, but over a course of years.
I came into a process where I was a part of a team helping to create a national level of negotiations.
That was very few people eventually sitting around a table that could only handle about eight or 10 around the immediate table.
And it was a view of change that was driven more by a viewpoint of top down.
At the same time, where I spent most of my activity and engagements was in local communities spread across the whole geography,
and in that wide dispersed geography, there were many, many people but mostly invisible,
and they were often talking about how do they access influence and the things they care about in their communities and in their country?
And in the middle. Which was this small team of people that I was working with were people who had connexions up and down.
That is that they could knock on the door of the Minister of the Interior and to get an appointment.
They were actually people who knew and had lived with the heads of the militia groups and could go at any time to speak with them.
But most of their work were through organisations that were touching the communities in the east coast of Nicaragua.
And what I found in this. Was he essentially.
That this was something and I put a question mark here by it that I didn't know how to name already in my naming.
I could find very little where I was trained and had grown up in the work of peace building that named with clarity,
a notion of community based local grassroots bottom up that already was something that had not found its due course,
much less this thing that seemed to move between the community level and that thing you see at the top over there,
which looks like a table of about eight people. And what I described was what it felt like to travel.
Between those realities. To be one day in a community and the next day in a five star hotel.
The completely different realities of what you're experiencing coexisting.
And in principle, purporting to build the same thing.
Much of what I found was gaps, and I think the two biggest gaps I noticed when I felt like Alice in Wonderland cap number one was so much of
what we talked about in reference to that top table area drew from the language and experiences of diplomacy.
International diplomacy applied into the context of internal but deep rooted and often civil war level conflict.
Within those concepts of diplomacy, there was almost a non-existent concept of grassroots peacebuilding did not even have much room to exist.
The second thing I noticed was there was very little understanding of a relationship centric view of how social change happens.
It was driven much more by questions of power, questions of compromise, questions of documents, proposals in arriving at a solution.
I think that what I was experiencing was complexity, and I was trying by way of this napkin doodle to describe complexity,
and that complexity is essentially about multiple actors.
Who sit in different places in the situation, different locations who are involved in different sets of initiatives,
and that multiplicity happens at the same time.
In other words, it's multiplicity plus simultaneity. The the pyramid approach to a large degree was trying to make sense of the multiplicity.
What I found at a later point, and I'll come back to that in a few minutes.
Was it the hardest part of complexity is actually around the challenge of simultaneity?
So that in large part. Was the complexity.
And while computer graphics could not capture. With the napkin, doodle did 10 years later in the book The Moral Imagination.
My father, who was a far better hand than mine,
drew all of my graphics by hand because I no longer could take the computer based graphics that became so rigid.
So you see, on one side, that's roughly 19 mid 1990s, and on this side 2005, you can see some evolution coming.
You can see it coming back to the original doodle in some ways because in that original doodle, the complexity question I was after was this.
Is it possible to hold at the same time, relational spaces and levels,
levels and abstraction around what happens in society in reference to leadership and representation?
Relationship, meaning their actual existing relationships.
And I would often find myself when I was talking about something like you see on the right here about vertical and horizontal relationships
that I would have to draw them in forms of overlapping circles or circles that at least gave some sense that they were spheres of connexion.
And this for me.
Was an evolution that was significant to come back to the notion that there is a deep tension between levels and relational connexion.
I think probably, though, the hardest part of it was simultaneity,
and neither of these diagrams really are really related to the challenge of simultaneity.
The emphasis was more on who the actors are.
Our systems of response to complexity, I think.
Especially in peace building and probably the whole field of international relations and diplomacy are organised much more around fragmentation,
much more around our specialisations, our preferred actors.
But we have a kind of unassuming acceptance that the processes that we propose and engage in require sequence reality.
They require complexity and somewhat simultaneity to fit into a process that's defined by steps and stages by this before that.
But the reality that I lived consistently. Was that was not true?
Everything happens at the same time.
And this, I think,
posed a very significant paradox that I've dealt with and of the things that were carried forward after the publication of that first book,
the one that carried the most white, the widest echo, I guess I would say, was the notion of the middle out.
So this leads me to my second evolution.
The paradoxes of interdependence from the middle out was something of an innovation, and people found that it fit certain locations that they had.
This was particularly true of the NGO bifurcation of much of peacebuilding.
The challenges that come from this I found coming to me from two sources, the first source was students.
In case you haven't figured this out yet, students are the universe's gift to undress the inductive theorist,
the person that's creating all of this theory and then they show up in class and say, Professor, yes, but and a lot of the yes,
but that I was getting was essentially, how could you name this middle out if these people are not leaving the situation,
they're engaged within the context they're talking about relationships that they have to build with in that particular location.
It's not about them leaving it and then trying to act on it from outside.
It's about them being a part of it. And the second place I got a lot of yes, buts was from local communities.
Their single biggest issue was this.
You talk about bottom up, but we know the experience of bottom up when representatives go from our community up they go and don't come back.
It's just upward movement out that does not attend, even though they claim to be stakeholders.
It does not attend to the deepest aspirations that we have as communities.
So how can you have a middle out if the people that are wanting to go are just trying to get up there someplace to be something?
It only replicates, so I was.
Getting hit from all sides, this is the good part about being inductive and theory, you know, theory doesn't mean it's concluded.
This remains my best guess for now. And you come back the tests and what I found pretty consistently.
Was I located two sources that influenced my thinking? The first source was that I was being drawn ever more into conversations with diplomats,
sort of been in the mid 90s to the early 2000s and in the diplomatic world.
There were a few spokespersons who were offering to be teachers to other diplomats, and I sat with one of them one day and heard this story.
And this is the basic story of how to be a good mediator.
And the essence of the story was built on a metaphor of a funnel.
So the diplomat teacher was saying, it's a messy world out there.
And if you want to be a good mediator, you're going to have to understand that where you want to be is at the gateway, the fulcrum of the funnel.
Because you want to make sure. That everything comes through you.
That was the idea. Everything comes through you.
Now that funnel notion, I think most of us would raise some questions, especially if that diplomat happened to be from Washington,
D.C. and was an American about how control is exerted on people to follow certain ways that the process must be controlled.
This was laid side by side.
With an experience I had with my son, who at the time was about 10 watching television and we saw a movie of how a spider makes a web.
And I got captivated by listening to the language that the Web watchers, scientists who study web making the language they used to describe the web,
and that was part of my evolution because their language offered something that I had
not seen before or heard in quite the same way when it was applied to peacebuilding.
And essentially, in this moral imagination, this was the drawing of the evolution of a web where my focus was more on the structure of the web.
The anchor points at the far edges of the space to be covered, the criss crossing creation of hubs,
the ways in which you work, both at the periphery and at the centre.
The movement of radio that connect back and forth.
There were a whole range of things that, for me created a language to describe a structure that I found interesting.
But it also described some of what I had travelled and connected to and understood.
This was in large degree. The challenge of trying to figure out how you connect into that question, is it possible to have relationships and levels?
You may notice where my feelings already come forward in that last drawing that the web.
Even though my father did a very good job in drawing it, the Web never fits neatly in the pyramid.
It's a range of things that are happening that these two worlds are actually quite different.
And I think what comes from that? Is that the notions that you're dealing with are the deep paradoxes, the profound paradoxes of interdependence?
In which each piece is needed, but each piece only rises to its fullest potential when connected to others.
And that, for me, began to draw me in this following direction.
Less emphasis on the structure of the Web.
More attention to the movement of the spider that I'll come to in a minute.
But also that the core of the work required a profound humility.
A curiosity and the patience. Curiosity.
Patience and humility, however, were not the mainstay of what I found being taught in peace building 101.
So I will tell you from a personal experience. That I can recall of absolutely not one.
No significant moment in peacebuilding. When I felt in control.
In fact, I would wager. That if you do not feel tiny, if you do not feel tiny in the vastness of what we're facing.
You have not arrived at an adequate understanding of what the vocation of peace will require of you.
Maybe several very stark antonyms would help.
The antonym of curiosity is arrogant.
Arrogance is I know it all, and I don't need. The antonym of interdependence.
Is not independent. In building the antonym of interdependence is the pursuit of control.
To make it only function by way of me, mine and art.
This led to a third evolution, the paradoxes of coordination.
And the paradoxes of co-ordination were a very interesting process for me, but it had to do with observing more carefully the movement of the spider,
but also considering back in my own experience how it was that ideas themselves emerged and wider consensus was developed.
I used to teach the book Building Peace, and there's a chapter in there titled Coordination.
And whenever I taught that chapter, I would tell students upfront, This is the weakest link in the whole book.
This is the hardest thing to wrap your head around. I don't think we have it yet.
And for me, that has remained true. I think there is in many regards,
something more akin to a thousand conversations that are happening simultaneously than to the notion
that somehow coordination is about the task of bringing it to one location by way of a final.
Now, what I came to eventually was that I located a definition of the paradox of coordination,
but it came from entomology, not from sociology, entomology.
The study of insects in the 1950s identified a research question which was this one.
How do collectives cohere around common purpose without centralised control?
What were they studying? Well, they were studying ants. And termites and bees.
And they landed on an answer to the. Coordination paradox, which was the way that coordination without centralised control happens.
They put a weird name on it. Stigma. Stigma, you may know, is a negative way that you.
You pocket somebody. According to the way they look or who they are, where they come from.
Stigma actually means a mark or a sign or a scent.
And in entomology, it was primarily that the way it happened was that answer termites left a scent in the landscape.
That's the literal terminology of the finding that answered the question and that were the scent was left.
Others followed and added so that you get the kind of movement that you may see here.
Where's the resource?
How do we bring it where the trails that are unmarked are known by way of travel that's gone before by circulating back and forth?
I actually found this quite riveting because. Some of what comes from that.
It's a very different way of understanding, bridging, for example, how ants will cohere around gaps.
The ability to hold and maybe even the capacity to move vertically, who knows?
But what? What comes with the scent in the landscape?
Is that it's very possible that there is existing a significant and important tension between circulating and convening.
But the head into the mainstay of the sacred cows of our field, so bear with me for a moment, I think that much of our model,
many of our models are based on some form of representation that requires some form
of funnelling in order to get to the process by which we can manage the sequence,
reality and decision making that then is offered back to the whole.
And this is and will remain amongst the greatest fragilities that we have in our work.
Circulation at its essence is when there are conversations moving around the landscape, actually moving and travelling.
And when I began to look back at my own work, I would speculate if I'm honest about it.
I would expect that very possibly. Ninety percent of my time in real life, practitioner work on the ground.
90 percent of my time is probably around stitching the thousand conversations moving from community to community,
engaged in ways that you're involved in what we might call collective empathy rather than individuated empathy.
Collective empathy would be to sit long enough to see how the world feels and looks from that street corner, from that village,
from those porches to understand that that conversation requires going around and
coming back again and going around and coming back again because at every iteration.
And that was the language I began to evolve, iterate, iterate, evoke at every iteration you pick up and you drop,
you pick up and you drop as ideas emerge and begin to find ways of cohering.
This is quite different than convening where in some form or fashion,
somebody has to control the large numbers in order to get to those who will sit at that table.
That for me. LED insight into why it's so hard to shift mindsets.
Why is it so hard for us to shift from event? The deeper, more prolonged process,
why is it hard for us to move from solutions to generative platforms that can
continuously put forward ideas that are emergent around what is in the context,
emerging? Why is it so hard that we want to focus on picking the fruit?
Rather than dedicating ourselves to the permanence of seasonal unfolding,
of understanding that it is the ground and the ways that everything interacts is key.
This led to my fourth evolution with the last one, and I'll get to my conclusions later.
Paradox of in-between this. Many of you know that for quite some time, I've been a proponent of the central city of the arts and peace building.
My basic view is that much of what we do requires a creative act because we have to get through what exists to something that's not quite there yet.
We don't always envision ourselves as artists, we envision ourselves as technicians.
And I think it is a limiting aspect of what we do. Creativity is so significant.
I learnt long ago in Northern Ireland from a good friend who said, you know, conflict is known pieces the mystery.
Conflict is now in pieces, the mystery, and I think within that.
The artist Debussy had it right. Music is what happens between the notes.
Music is what happens between the notes. I don't think that one or the other can exist without each other.
They're not exclusive. But there is an emphasis on something here that is happening in between.
And I'm not sure how to illustrate this. So here is my very difficult try.
I think it has to do with how we focus in and where we have access that.
We then create a frame of reference that gives us meaning.
And what we choose to focus on in the frame we have is often limiting us to a small piece of a complex puzzle.
So let me see if I can illustrate. We may see.
A rising bud of new growth. We may see.
The green moss and the ground from which the bud began its growth.
We may see the rain. It is descending all around that growth.
And at times, we may step back just far enough to see that they're held together in some way that they interrelate.
We may see the eye of something that seems significant in arriving.
We may see how that I. Is attached to wings that are landing.
But we don't always see. The whole. Of the picture.
Every one of those was a small frame. And in some regards, it's a little like what we do in building.
We take note of what it is that we think is significant.
What is clear is that it is much harder to notice their presence together.
It's much harder to notice and see what lies between the elements of an ecosystem that makes that eco system come alive and stay alive.
An ecosystem understanding depends much more on making visible the in between this.
And I think that that is at the essence of coordination and interdependence. It requires that the core of peaceful change.
Is not primarily in what is immediately visible.
But in how we attend to the essential, mostly invisible tissue that keeps us and the ecosystem whole.
So coming back to my conclusions, I often find myself making a full circle in some ways.
It seems that. For years.
This is what it feels like in people. Sitting with a massive, tangled mess around us and attending with hands to that which we have some access to.
I wonder, even in the framing of our question, who builds peace,
does that nudges in the direction of isolating the WHO as if the holy grail will be located in a given person,
a group, an idea, an initiative, a particular proposal, all of which seems to suddenly push us,
nudge us into the pursuit of control around coordination.
But the narrow focus on who and coveting control create traps.
And I guess that's what I'd like to leave today. I think they limit appreciation of profound interdependence.
They tend toward toxic forms of power.
Perhaps the ancient future that we need is some notion of how to build a different, healthier ecosystem of alongside A.
And in between this, the ability to be present and nurture the less visible stitching that breeds the whole.
I think our dominant models that we've lived with for decades need to find a new iteration.
I don't think we'll face climate change. I don't think we'll face what's emergent in many parts of our world by replicating the models
that have had the level of fragility dependent upon sequence reality and to a large degree,
forms of representation. We will have to find this movement from zero to one.
I'm not sure fully what it is, but I think it's got something to do with trust, connective tissue and the permanent preparation of the messy net.
By way of untangling and repair. Who builds peace?
My five word answer is I think it's the ecosystem. The sum of the parts has always proven bigger and different than any individual.
Perhaps ecosystem would also help us defocus the Stitcher and refocus on the stitching.
To bring into focus that which lies within and between us,
the ways in which the quality of our presence and the quality of our relationships unfold with myriad ways of participation,
connexion and coordination, constantly moving and weaving this permanent in permanence without centralised control.
I think it's the patient stitching of impermanent peace that we need to find a way to evolve into.
Thank you. Thank you very much for getting us off to a great start.
I think that will be coming back to a lot of the themes that you've introduced this morning.
And without further ado, because I'd like to make people take full advantage of the limited time that we have available.
Invite Tanya now to join the podium and time permitting, we'll have some comments questions at the end.
Otherwise we'll have to reserve this for later in the day.
Over to you. Thank you. I would first say a few words about your presentation and then move on to what I want to say.
First of all, thank you. It's fantastic to be with you and for bringing all of us together.
We haven't seen each other in a while. And I wanted to just sort of like, do the segmentation would basically mean to give a whole, I think, seminar?
Probably we could go on for a for a whole month for programme and kind of analysing where we came from as a field and what our theories are,
how we have developed, how not. And so I think it would be wonderful and I'm very tempted to do it.
But I think probably not now, because then we would so.
But what I wanted to ask is the point. So one thing is what you said and what you said is, yeah, I don't know.
But when I'm not there, I. No, it's fine, I can say here, I'm just I'm a bit of a mover, but I can do.
So what what I really want to highlight why I think the rock is wonderful, not just because he's a wonderful human being and person,
but also, on the one hand, what you said, what he has given to us is a field like the concepts, the ideas.
But I think in the I've learnt a lot from you, but only like conceptually, but also like the way.
And I remember when we first met, we had heard of each other. I was a Ph.D. student at the time and I was about to reach a point in Iraq.
It was very exciting and we were in the same training, actually training a group of eastern Europeans and.
And I was talking about mediation, and he was talking about conflict transformation,
I was sneaking into his class, hiding in the back, and I was really,
really and it really made a lot of things to me because so what he did is he talked
about a case and he chose a case where he was the mediator and the mediation failed.
And I was so impressed. I hadn't heard this before.
I was at the time already with a lot of diplomats that were giving all these speeches and you know,
exactly the picture you said the controlled mediator,
and that comes this person with so many ideas and just presents a case where he basically didn't win the case.
And I thought, this is exactly what it is. It's about being humble. And so I'm always in this.
There's a U.N. high level mediation training, so I had the honour to be there as a trainer.
And there is this flip chart they have for all the trainers who come in.
It's just a few where you say, what are the key qualities of a mediator?
And I'm towards the end of that class and you see always, it's listening.
It's controlling, it's like getting this and this, and I will always write down, Park your ego.
Because I have seen so many of us this is tell mainly because of male egos.
And he is a white male. That's the opposite of it was a humble person who really knows it's about the others.
It's not about us. And I think that's so that's about him.
And then I want to pick up, you looked into the past and I want to look into the future.
So I think that fits, but you have to help me and how do we start looking into the future?
I want to start in the presence. With a little video, it's very short.
However, Gone outlined. All right, that's where we are.
And that's about the whole point. So what I really wanted to say is the world is such a mess and so much out of
order that we don't have the luxury to think what we do in the next 50 years.
We have to just start now. And who's the we?
I think that we as peace builders, peace researchers, everybody who thinks we should not let this planet basically die.
And what I really think is that there has been this, this movie.
Have you seen this Hollywood blockbuster? Don't look up.
If not, you should see it. I thought it was really bringing it all together because it showed this,
this comment that comes to the Earth and it's this fundamental destruction of the planet.
And then it has all the features of how we are.
Our fields is also in it has the scientists who won, who say, we've seen this, this is destroying the planet and we have the politicians,
Marilyn Streep, in this really fantastic role, like being like, What do I make for my constituency out of this?
Is this really serious? This is not serious. I don't care whether it's serious or not.
It's about how do I get my voters to vote for me because of this?
And then, of course, the media who just take it up and polarise everything and then business and capitalism who tries to,
even out of the destruction of the world, tries to gain money.
And this interrelation between science, politics, media and business, I think, is the reality we're in.
And it also shows like how science in that movie has been tried in some parts of science was co-opted in to the political rhetoric and the
other parts we didn't want to be co-opted was ridiculed basically and was basically outlawed as like Huggies are the wrong scientists.
So and I think this is this is basically where we are at.
And from the perspective, let's let's say what are the biggest challenges we have now?
And I think it's climate change. It's war and destruction and exclusion.
And of course, it's also health. But let me focus on climate change and and war.
And in. So I hold my my notes a bit as messy as the world.
So bear with me. I think it is very interesting to look at climate change, both in that kind of interconnected way,
like colleagues like Cedric also are doing, but also to learn from that field of action for us in our field.
Because in climate change, we had science and science was really pulling together the collective evidence.
What is there to show politicians that the world is really going down the drain?
And there's very few sort of the those, of course, contradictions.
But I think they overcome that and they have really a collective body of evidence
that shows there's a coherence in the scientific response to climate change.
The politicians have, as we know, made a little bit of movement, but not enough.
But we have a very established movement, especially with Fridays for Future.
Also, the new generation come in and brought the green parties in many countries into power and into parliament.
And so there's a young dynamic that's going on in the in the climate change world.
And this, of course, the business community resisting to this change.
So we have sort of the politicians in between the movement pushing and the science providing the evidence.
We are not saying we are there yet, but I think it's very interesting to learn from from that field of and the coherence that is in there.
So if we if we compare that to our field, where are we at?
I think we are not there kind of because in terms of the evidence we have, I think we are not producing collective evidence.
We are producing bits and pieces everywhere.
If we look into the into the world of conflict, not even I'm not talking about Afghanistan because it's just it's just too sad.
But we know the story.
But if we look at UNled peace processes in the last 10 years, we had Libya as the only one where there was a peace agreement signed the last 10 years.
And that's not a good record, and that one is very shaky.
Look at the processes in Syria and Yemen, where there is a road map by the U.N. Security Council that's like followed like the Holy Grail,
and everybody should talk to the UN and teams there to everybody around to look at.
Everybody thinks it's a non-starter, but we're just following the same roadmap.
Even if it's not working.
We can't go to places like Columbia and some of you from where we had a peace agreement, and there's so much struggle in implementation.
And but we can go further down the road.
Let's look at there's a lot of evidence, as you know from colleagues on the early peace processes and peace agreements.
Look at Bosnia. Where has this really produced inclusive societies?
It's far away. So, yeah, so it's like, I think we are very far away from as a field collectively claiming any, any like tremendous moves.
So, so so why is it like that? And I think I like them very much what you said.
It's not who can build peace. It's about what? What do we need to collectively do to do a better job?
OK, a couple of couple of ideas.
So the first thing, maybe more from a conceptual research point of view and then what this means also from a sort of practitioner point of view.
But they are interlinked because I very much agree with the picture of the ecosystem because what happens is,
interestingly, researchers always think they cannot influence change and politics.
But we can and we do all the time and sometimes they take things from us like I've written a piece.
I remember well on how Jean-Paul Tryc model has been helping to produce a piece industry,
and now how the middle out approach became the business component of the peacebuilding field we had.
I think I sent him the draught of that article at the time. He sent me 10 pages respondents.
I thought, OK, which helped me greatly shape it.
And I had some really furious people calling me and saying, like, How can you challenge John Paul in Iraq?
And I said, first of all, he has done that himself in the moral imagination.
I'm just referencing and sort of rubbing it in more.
But the point is I was not criticising theory. I was criticised the way it was interpreted as the holy grail of now.
This is the peacebuilding NGO world. This is what we do. Yeah, we find our local pets and we give them all the money.
We go to the donors, give the money and we don't support the ecosystem,
but we support some elites in the capitalist speak our language and that are not the movements or I have been a fan just with a political movement.
Let's call it like that. And we're just having a hard time at the moment.
And they told us then that they have they don't know what to do at this stage of the movement because all the money goes to NGOs.
And how do you fund the movement that is in a suppressed country where you can't be in country?
And so think about that.
What we have studied, what we have all written about is the transformation of social movements into kind of professional NGOs,
the NGO ization of movements. And I'm there. I'm seeing it.
And like how to help these people, not to do it. How to hold the movement together.
What evidence do we have? How can we show that it's not the weight?
But then comes the donor and say, if you're not an NGO with an address, we can't find you.
So we are. We are in this. So what is it?
What we need to do? I think the first thing we need to do is fundamentally change our assumptions.
And deconstruct a lot of our theories and concepts.
And the first one is, of course, the way. We are teaching and we are training and we are writing about peacebuilding as a linear thing.
That somehow comes from negative peace miraculously to positive peace in a straight line.
And then you have seen I mean, no new mediation and negotiation training, so there is this conflict phases.
And I always feel like in an economics lecture where when there was a student and was also looking into this and I always thought like,
I don't get the economy, the economy is understanding of the world because you put all these things and theories out and you say,
OK, the only work under the condition that ABC TFG is not there means reality.
And that's basically how a big part of the constructions of our theory building is we exclude reality.
So, of course, not all of them, and it's like some of them, but that means we can't live with that, literally.
Like I think Elton's notion of negative and positive piece is brilliant.
I love the 69 articles. It's just brilliant. But what we as a field have not managed is to fill the gap.
What is in between negative and positive peace? Is it just the liberal peace out there that creates these wonderful democracies?
But how do we get there in this messiness and how do we understand that it's not about success, success and failure?
We have to stop talking about success and failure. It's so discouraging.
If you tell people, Oh, you haven't succeeded, this was a failure. Analyse yourself, take a look for to do that.
No, it is about. Understanding that resistance is not just civic resistance to authoritarian regimes,
it's resistance of authoritarian regimes and armed actors to stay in power and governments.
So there is many different interpretations of resistance, and it means going forward and going backwards is just normal,
helping people to understand it's the norm that you make gains and you go backwards and you go forward and backward all the time.
Kristen Bell's team at the political settlement has this wonderful graphic.
I'm using it a lot about sort of the peace process is from the early nineties and you see all these lines.
It looks like this. That's the reality.
If you processes go like this and if you, for example, in Colombia, have a have a setback in your process, that's normal.
Just face it and say it's just normal, so what do we do? What can be done?
That's the question. It's not like, Oh, we lost it, we failed. Where did we do wrong?
No, it's about how what's the ecosystem?
Why is this element in the ecosystem stronger? And we know it?
How can we counteract that? What kinds of energies do we have and strategies to do that?
And who was the we? How do we influence the ecosystems leads?
So it's really about that. I would like to also deconstruct a number of other concepts just on the science.
Let's take peace agreements and peace agreements.
Yes. OK, if we have them fine so we can have them.
But the point is, there are so many types of sort of mechanism that make a society agree on something.
Peace agreement is one thing. There's constitutional reform processes. There is national dialogues.
There's so many different spaces where societies on different levels have important historical moments where change happens.
Peace agreement is one of them. So if we see that this whole notion about who sits at the table, who participates, it's kind of not relevant.
The relevance is how can the ecosystem influence change at a given moment in what kind of structures and mechanisms that make more sense?
Let me see what's on my deconstructionist. I've them all.
Now I think. Let me move to Reconstruction. So if this all is not peace building, what is peace building?
OK, the concept I at the moment is in my mind that might be a temporary thing is implicit.
I call it perpetual peace building. And that is that peace building is the permanent re negotiation of the social and political contract in societies.
And that means it's also not happening somewhere in a messed up conflict place.
It happens all the time in France,
when President Macron came up with his reform package after he was overwhelmingly given a mandate to change so many things.
And then he came up and then people said, No, no, no, no, no, no, not my pension system, not this one.
And you have seen this big riots in Paris on the streets, people were dying in Paris on the streets,
and the government first reacted extremely violent, sending all the police forces.
And after all, this didn't work. And voters sort of support went so down.
They started the national dialogue in France three years ago, where McCoy himself went round, also from community to community, discuss with people.
So what's the problem with the reform package? And they they basically came up with a new one.
And I mean, the U.S. is so in need of having a national dialogue.
Black Lives Matter has shaken something,
but it's such a long way to go to get this polarised society together so you don't have to go into an armed conflict area.
But let's talk about like or we are working a lot in the choppier, for example,
where all the attention was on the conflict in Tigray and what it means to look into the ecosystem was where are there possibilities like,
I look at Jonathan there, I know conciliation resources doing a great job in sort of the Somali region to just look like what's working there.
We were trying to get actors together who wanted a national dialogue, and everybody said, this is not going to have a national dialogue.
We have to fix the conflict coming in and showing the evidence. You know, the national dialogues have taken place in parallel of armed conflicts.
It can get actors on board in the slow process. It's possible going around and trying to.
We have given so many inputs on evidence in embassies in D.C., in, you name it, to tell the internationals.
Also, you need to change your language. It's not only about tolerance polarised language.
Let's give a bit of hope in your language and we help to change a lot of those sort of statements of the EU, the US.
And suddenly, there was always national dialogue in the statements. Then something interesting happened.
So we were like, Oh hey, we made it to influence them. Are we good?
And then the your kids came to us and says, this is so I mean, taking away ownership of us.
Now, all the internationals talk about national dialogue. Oh God, what did you do?
So then how would you get it back? The narrative to help think that this is a nationally owned process?
You stay out. You internationals, yes, but support. And it was really a process.
We had to take people by the hand, especially the internationals,
to make them understand the literally how to write a statement that is not taking away national ownership.
Yeah, it's a difference between we.
The US want a national dialogue in Ethiopia or we, the U.S. are happy to see some Ethiopian actors coming together to.
You know, it's it's sometimes so banal, but it makes such a difference.
I wanted to just for a moment, come to Ukraine. I think it's.
This morning in the in the BBC. There was the first to news, of course, the first one is always Ukraine.
The second was that there has the biggest cut in trees and burning in the Amazon in Brazil has happened this last month.
One thousand square kilometres of rainforest have been cut down in one month.
That was the second news. I think it really shows where we are. Ukraine and climate change.
And on Ukraine. I mean, it's a very, very sad example of failed in this case, I think it's a good word preventative diplomacy.
It's very sad to see that the polarisation that goes on and also leading experts, colleagues of us will say yes, more arms,
which is maybe you can debate that if that's necessary or not and not going into that, but more arms for all the European armies.
Moses Putin has to do this and there nobody, hardly anybody talks about.
We need to renegotiate the peace and security architecture in Europe and globally because the U.N.,
obviously the Security Council can't work under the conditions. That was it.
I mean, we can debate whether that has ever worked.
In particular context. It has really worked as a platform to bring Russia and others together.
Why has this platform not delivered? Do we need to abolish it?
Do we need to demand it? Do we need parallel platforms, other elements in the ecosystem?
That's what we need to discuss.
I had a couple of interviews out in newspapers I got I tell you, people were writing to me on Twitter to say, like, you are lunatic nuts.
Basically, how can you talk to the devil? I think like, Oh my God, all these concepts, there's such a demonisation going on.
And there's totally no understanding, if you say, but there might be security interests of Russia.
People say, like, what are you for Putin? And so we see the whole discourse in our society as if.
Think this and this, and we are now in the centre of this in Europe.
And people say like, I had an article for a newspaper and they sent, you're not positioning yourself in this or that way.
I'm like, Wait a moment.
We are trying to bring evidence and sense into the debate and don't want to as scientists position ourselves and can be or can be.
So what's going on here? It's it's it's crazy for how messy and where where does it lead us?
What do we do with all this? This polarised world of exclusion, of of of even it's just getting worse and worse and worse.
I think the first thing for me is if we keep in the picture of the ecosystem is collective action.
But what does it mean? How would it look like for let's start with scholars.
What can we as scholars do? What can we just do?
I think we can do a lot. I think we have to start from the essence of peace research, because do we need peace research?
Kind of know my former director at the Grattan Institute would say no.
And he rejected every single proposal to start a master's programme in peace and conflict studies because he said We are not I our school.
And as such, we treating that subject cross disciplinary. It's OK, you can do that.
So why do we need peace research? I think let's go back to why peace research was founded.
The founding mothers and fathers basically said we need peace research only because of one reason and that it's an intentional science.
It has an intention to produce evidence that can change the world.
If you want to say it in this kind of pathetic kind of formulation,
but it's like that's why peace research was founded and in much of the peace research and the Cold War,
as you know, was geared towards basically bringing the science into the east and east west conflict.
And I think the point is it's intentional. It cannot just hide behind science.
No, we have to do something with it.
And it doesn't mean that everybody, all of us have to instantly run around like John Paul and I do and talk to petitioners.
No, that's not the point. The point is, how do we get our collective evidence together for the cause?
We have a lot of area of studies, and you will hear a lot of interesting presentations also today on different aspects.
How do we get all these research findings together? How do we get them together in making a case for the course?
What group of people have to come together and say we need to start somewhere
and getting this evidence together to show and not just having expert experts,
be experts talking to the media on subject whatever having a collective of responsible,
I call it peace scholars that still committed to the cause and say everything we do and that we research will contribute.
But how exactly we need to find out we need to get coherence in it.
It's not every country has the luxury like you have in the UK with this big research project.
But of course, they also they control everything. But we need to set priorities and say, what do we want to achieve now?
And in the next five years? And what kind of message is we as a scientific community want to put out there to the field?
We have to speak with collective voices. So that's intentional science.
And what can practitioners do? I mean, they can join the movement.
Of course, the intention of the movement, and of course, the problem is most of them.
They think they are already on the track because they are the ones doing it.
But I think there is this issue and I'm not elaborating on on on all the challenges and the peace of the expectation of you.
But because of the sort of peace industry that we have created and the very fact that if you don't get funding, it's very hard to move the cause.
It's because we have lost the connexion to the movement we once were.
There are movements in many parts of the world and very brave movements.
I'm always fascinated by the Sudanese. Just don't give up, no matter what happens.
Just go back to the streets. But not everybody can even do it because some of the return spaces are so,
so so violently shrinking the space that people can't even go to the streets of just 10 days with a movement that is in that situation.
And it's very heartening how you can see how they're losing the influence to that.
We know from evidence if you are too long in exile, you losing that one connexion.
So, so what can we do? But what we don't have, you don't have a peace movement.
Do we need one? I'm not sure. I don't think we need a traditional peace movement that goes around peace on Earth
because nobody will listen to us because it has to always something specific,
something that's attractive to people at that very moment where they can put their course in it.
There's so much stupidity going on on Instagram and Twitter.
I've lately joined Instagram just to see what are people doing.
It's fascinating. I mean, besides that, I follow my kids and and then I call them and say, like little.
I have just seen that your cat got lost. Very important information.
Why don't you tell me I have to read it on Instagram and or when Kim Kardashian lost her hair or whatever her diamond earring while swimming?
I mean, so many sad people around the world. And that's an enormous potential, isn't there?
We should not say this stupid bloggers. No, we should say, how can we make them intentional?
How can we show them that you can talk about your earring and you can have your Prada back?
And at the same time, you can have other things that you also think that are that important.
It's not just making them like worse because they are like this.
There are so many and there are so many movements in the world this Fridays for Future.
There's no Fridays for a peaceful future. I think we need to go back and think, and I don't have the immediate answer, but I'm working on it.
And how do we build movements that support the ecosystem?
It's almost like a positive need to where we say MeToo came together, united people under a negative thing.
How can we create a positive MeToo that deliberately is not controlled,
that deliberately has those ecosystems where in some countries under the same label people might think like,
Well, we're doing this particular thing now. In others, it's a label.
And I think we need to get to this and we need to join hands and bring sort of the spider web taking this together.
And that is not working if it's not intentional. It is not happening, but just saying like, it's all coherent.
It's all beautiful. It's not. There's also lots of power relations.
If we would only start. My God. I mean, think about a couple of guys coming together thinking about who's leading the movement.
So it's also being real and thinking about how can we in a world full of power, we will not get away with just having a power less movement.
No, it has to be powerful. But how can we avoid the eagles and they will come?
How can we bring the collective together and sort of do a lot of things together and join forces, really?
I think this is what I think we need to do, and we together will have answers.
And I think that's what we need to do.
Scientists need to get together and think about what we do with our collective evidence and what evidence we need for what kind of cause,
which is not belittling other evidence that might not be relevant for this particular cause.
And we need as peacebuilding community come together and think about how do we how do we get out of some circles we are in?
How can we educate our donors if we can't educate them?
Then we look. We use the same means like they use, we influence the media to influence the movements.
IPAC mouth them in parliament. We, you know, there's this means they use strategies.
Why can't we use them? I mean, how come that communication is such an underdeveloped thing in our field?
It's like I have been working once with them, with one country in Asia.
Actually, the Philippines and present the tattoo is super unpopular in the West, very popular in some parts of the Philippines.
But what I find fascinating it was in the mediation between the Norwegian led mediation between the communist movement and the government,
and I was an advisor to this process. And then came the communication team and they had some exchange also with the with the fake communication
advisers and the fake communication advisor told them what they did with the fog and stuff.
And then these guys came with the PowerPoint to say like, Well, you know, we're thinking 10 years ahead.
Here's our campaign to win over Parliament is our campaign to win over business community is our campaign.
I was like, Wow, this is it. This is this long term communication thinking, how do they were thinking about how do you how,
how we do this in schools, how do we do this on social media?
It was a whole bunch of political communication, people that were basically lend to the peace process.
And I have never seen such proportionality around. And I think that's what we are lacking.
And it would be so easy to do that if you can sell and have George Clooney drink coffee and say, buy an espresso.
While we know the coffee is kind of OK but not really good, it's ten times more expensive.
It creates a mendel's environmental pollution, and you're even getting a kind of metal poisoning over time because of this lopping off the capsules.
But you can tell it it's the best seller of Nestlé. It has overtaken chocolate sales by Nestlé.
We need to sell peace and we can do it. So what I want is I simply want that you join me in this and let's get inspired by each other.
Thank you.