And I'm very conscious being back in Oxford that 30 years ago, exactly 30 years ago, I finished the thesis here,
writing about how people in the Soviet Union had fought in the Second World War and adapted to civilian life after the war.
The process of demobilisation and I had the very good fortune immediately as I finished that thesis to stumble into a job at international
labs and to set up a programme for what we then called conflict resolution in the former Soviet Union and particularly in the caucuses,
just as the war in Abkhazia was breaking out.
And that's actually a context that's, I suppose dominated my life since.
And sort of looking back at that time, a couple of us were just reflecting that lunch that in a way,
the 90s were a bit of a boom period for conflict resolution, peacebuilding and the 20s.
A current decade feels a bit like a doom period,
with the sort of unholy trinity of covered conflicts and climate change dominating, dominating our thinking.
And so what I'm going to reflect on a little bit in my presentation is less of the wonderfully eloquent reflections that we had this morning,
but perhaps a slightly more prosaic perspective of.
What does it mean to be involved in running a peace building organisation? And so in a way, I stand here is what I see as a peace building bureaucrat.
Sadly, I'm less doing the hands on work these days,
but hopefully doing a reasonably good job to facilitate that fantastic team of 80 colleagues who are out there doing the peace,
building work and engaging with communities and contexts and complexity in in those endeavours and working
with any given time 60 to 80 partner organisations living the conflicts that they're trying to transform.
And I'm extraordinarily conscious that the work that we do and when I think about trying to answer this question,
who builds peace, that the people who build peace and the people who.
I think of people who are doing on one level, ordinary and on another level extraordinary work on a daily basis.
And tragically, who too often give their lives for this very dear friend of mine.
Just dropped dead last November. Younger than me, 52, that he had worked himself to an early grave.
Others, and we will know them have have been killed in the pursuit of trying to build peace.
And I think, you know, we need to reflect that is a high stakes endeavour to try and build peace not just in political or legal terms,
but in terms of life and death. And I'm more conscious than ever that this is a work of many hands.
Building peace is not something that you do alone. And there are many angles to it.
So I speak from a perspective of conciliation, resources, peacebuilding, mediation support, NGO.
But I am very conscious that we do this in what I mean.
John Paul this morning use the term ecosystem,
and I was thinking of using it in terms of the ecosystem in which we operate alongside intergovernmental organisations, multilateral organisations,
government states, non-state armed groups and civil society,
and its manifold existence and the sorts of organisations to movement activists and to bureaucrats who pursue this effort.
And I think of the words of my friend and colleague Andy Karl, who founded Conciliation Resources twenty eight years ago,
and Andy had a mantra that the people most affected and often most insightful about what it needs,
what needs to be done to address conflict are often the least well resourced to do so.
And in some ways, that's how Andy came up with what many people consider the strange and conciliation resources.
And I think this idea of how do you provide resources to the people who are most exposed, most vulnerable, but also most invested in change?
How do you provide them resources to enable them to do this in a in a sustained way?
In recent years, quite rightly, the discourse around local peacebuilding has become very powerful.
And it's a very dynamic one and I think critical to our understanding of what it is we're all involved in.
But I also think it's really important that we don't make a fetish of the notion of the vocal.
On the one hand, I find it some times can be terribly patronising to talk of local peace builders.
And then these internationals who come in on one level, we're all local and we should be very wary of that dichotomy.
But I also think that it touches on.
I mean, it touches on what John Paul spoke about when he spoke about the dichotomy between inside a partial mediators and outside neutral actors.
I hope we've learnt that the outside a multi partial actor is not neutral about the violations and the abuses and the butchery that they witness.
But if you choose to be a peace builder, if you choose to support processes of mediation, you do sometimes have to step back and not take sides.
And that can be painful, can be uncomfortable, but you need to think about what's your role, what's your contribution?
But I just want to think about the term local on another level.
The societies that become immersed in conflict do so for a myriad of different reasons.
Geopolitics has been mentioned, and I think that's a powerful driver, and it's one that is on some levels inescapable.
I was in an event last weekend with someone who used the time, the geopolitical squeeze, and I think it's a very powerful one.
But at the same time, those people who are striving for change within conflict ridden societies.
They are often asking for they need external support.
Societies get enmeshed in conflict because unfortunately of the dysfunctions that people within struggled to resolve than their own.
So the question is how do you bring support from outside in a respectful, meaningful way that sustains effective peacebuilding?
And one of the things that we think about very deeply in our organisation is
the question of what is meaningful and effective in the peacebuilding sphere.
And in some ways, I think that relationship between the people whose conflict is we're trying to
transform that conflict and the people from outside how they work together,
that relationship is part of the alchemy of what it is to build peace.
So when I asked myself who builds peace, I think of the multiple partnerships that we're involved in.
And a few years ago, we did some research to try and unpack what our understanding of partnership and peacebuilding is.
There's been a lot of work on partnership in multiple spheres, and we want to think, what does it mean for us as a peace building organisation?
And we came up with four findings that I think were very important for our sense of who we are as an organisation.
So I want to share those with you and then talk a little bit about some of the specific contributions that can be made.
One is what we call an accompaniment approach.
And we think this is particularly suited to what we recognise as being long term
and adaptive peacebuilding around the genuine commitment to working with people,
but to co-creating what it is you do in the strategies that are designed and developed and really genuinely thinking about what does
it mean to provide the space that gets beyond outputs and deliverables that all too often get talked about to focus on the change?
Secondly, I think there's a question around the diverse set of relationships with different organisations have different mandates and profiles,
and that can be a real strength in peacebuilding.
When you have partners who amplify each other's strengths and when you have a genuine consideration for what complementarity means,
sadly we're conscious that there's a balance between remote partnering and being present.
We don't have offices in all the context where we work. We do in some and we always have to think, why are we there?
What we seeking to achieve in being there?
And how do we navigate the politics which is essential for the people within their own societies building peace?
But it's also essential for you as an outsider coming in.
You bring reputational challenges for your partners.
You bring questions around the privileged access that you, as an outsider, as an international often have.
And how does that jeopardise what people within their own societies do?
And how do you use that privilege access? In the interests of people within society, not within your own interests.
And that takes a lot of choreography and intent to ensure that unheard voices and marginalised voices get given due recognition.
And then fourthly, I think there's an issue. Around balance in the contractual aspects of partnership and aspiration and activism for change.
On one level, as an outside organisation often has the funds channelled through you.
There's a question of.
Being able to act as a buffer to insulate people within conflict regions from some of the complex and competing demands imposed by donors.
But you have to balance that with making sure that it's not your agenda,
you're working to that you're really listening to the agendas of the people who are seeking change in their own society.
And then I think this question of how you navigate the overly prescriptive approaches of donors,
be it in the increasingly arduous compliance and regulatory domain that we constantly have to struggle with.
Be it the results based monitoring and evaluation that is so often out of tune with the non-linear nature of conflict in volatile contexts.
These are things that become a joint struggle. But the truth is, often times as an organisation based in London or wherever it might be,
you're dealing with this constantly, whereas if you're working with a community group.
In. Northern Central African Republic. It's a discourse that they have no experience of.
And so you can become the translator of how to deal with these sorts of issues.
But we I mean, and hopefully we use this role to also try and influence the donors to think about
how they use their resources and how they use that influence to bring about change,
to try and change some of these often absurd approaches.
Can't say we've been hugely successful today, but that's another story. So what is an NGO like?
Ours brings to the process of peace when we work with colleagues in conflict contexts.
Of course, it will vary from organisation to organisation, and it will vary from context to context.
But I want to just think of for that. I hope we try and do well.
One is bringing comparative experience. We work in some 20 contexts.
We also produce a journal called Code On.
Practise good, good. Different on practise, the practise of building peace and what is effective, what is less effective.
So we bring a lot of comparative experience to the table. And I was reminded in one of the breaks this morning talking with John all the that
when John was speaker of the Assembly in Northern Ireland in the early 2000s.
We brought several groups of Georgian and Abkhaz civic and political actors to Belfast to try and give them a different perspective on security,
economic, cultural, political issues as they impacted on their contacts.
And John shared his vision of how you move from violence to politics as a means to address conflict.
And that was a very powerful notion for Georgian and up close colleagues.
And so being able to bring that comparative perspective and one has to be careful with study visits
because they've become a bit of a go to tool over the years and they can be a waste of money.
Sometimes you've really got to think about them in a in a thoughtful, planned way to make them useful.
But I also think that the comparative experience you can bring, for instance, what we're doing.
Tanya mentioned what we're doing in the Somali regional state of Ethiopia, where we've been involved for more than a decade,
and it's actually one of the situations where we had the good fortune to help the signing of a peace agreement.
And that doesn't happen very often, I have to say.
But we're now working with colleagues there on efforts to look at how survivors, how victims can influence the process of transitional justice.
And we brought them brought those colleagues into contact with people doing this in a variety of
different places so they can see what's useful for them and what lessons they might want to learn.
A second row after the comparative experience is, I think as an outsider, you can play a really important role in supporting to bridge divides.
This can be very hard for insiders to do alone. Sometimes a structure of a conflict just makes it impossible.
Now I think of work that I've been intimately involved in in the Georgian conflict where you couldn't just walk across the divide,
you did need some kind of external facilitation to bring people together.
Likewise, in Kashmir. So in both those contexts, we've been involved in long standing dialogue initiatives across the conflict divide,
but actually initiatives of multiple levels,
bringing people together in political dialogue, bringing people together and educational initiatives in Kashmir.
Facilitating a long standing. But currently blocked process of a joint chamber of Commerce and industry.
The only cross line of Control body that has existed in Kashmir and this has been us,
is outsiders being able to play that facilitative role to bring people together?
I think of Connexions within societies that are fragmented,
so I've got colleagues in the Central African Republic at the moment working on what we call a decentralised dialogue,
recognising the dilemmas that was spoken of earlier of the the the centre and the peripheries of states.
And how do you bridge those divides? And we find that our partners in the Central African Republic need external support to facilitate that alone.
They've not been able to raise the resources or the access to make it happen.
So through partnership, we brought it to a new level.
Thirdly, I think about the the way we can provide challenge in spaces where people can think differently.
And I think that. One of the elements of that is how do you make the process of change less exclusive?
How do you bring different voices in that might not have that opportunity?
And again, I work with the owner left in August, and I think it's been quite instructive for us on that.
And then the fourth area where I think we bring a lot and it's been spoken about earlier
today is this question of access to resources and the nature of financing peacebuilding,
which in so many ways is demanding and inadequate. And there are challenges around financial cycles that John Paul spoke about 10 year funding.
Well, those of you who are involved in peacebuilding know that's the holy grail.
And you know what we do and I think of our experience of working in a George Knapp has context for 30 years.
Well, 25 years at S.R. beforehand, and we have to piece together a mosaic of funding and you're constantly trying to bridge gaps and keep the
resources going so you don't lose momentum in the initiatives and that you don't project ties what you're doing,
that you are thinking strategically, whether the funding environment makes that really hard.
And we have to constantly ask ourselves, are we diverting resources from people in the context who are trying to bring about change?
Or are we adding value? So what makes this work happen?
What's the glue? We've had a lot about relationships today, and quite rightly, John Paul spoke about curiosity, humility and patience.
I'd add to that durability, empathy and generosity.
I think the commitment to being there through fallow times is critical to building the credibility to be able to play a role.
I think questions of coordination and complementarity are essential.
Undoubtedly, NGOs trade on one another's toes.
But I think where I where we stand today compared to when I got involved 30 years ago, let alone 10 years ago,
the collaboration and the coordination between multiple organisations has moved on enormously, and I think there's a lot further to go.
But I'm heartened by the way I see people working together.
Tanya spoke about successes and failures and and clearly, we don't always achieve what we're striving for.
But we do know that commitment to stay engaged in processes is imperative.
And to do this, we need to navigate the politics. And as Andrew rightly emphasised, peacebuilding is fundamentally political.
Too many donors talk about people to people engagement as if you can detach it from the politics of a situation.
And David Bloomfield, speaking about reconciliation in a publication of ours a few years ago, said that people think reconciliation is soft.
And I apply that to people, to people diplomacy. They think it's soft, it's easy.
You can bring that into a process that's protracted and intractable. Our job is to find traction.
And reconciliation and people to people engagement is not soft, it's the hardest thing imaginable.
And in a world where we see governments throwing money at the militarised solutions of conflicts,
we need to find a way back to those soft issues that are actually the essence of what peacebuilding is.
And so the final comment I'd make is that in running a peace building organisation.
And and being run by my colleagues much of the time, I think the critical dimension we have to hold onto is thinking about what our values are,
what we stand for and to ensure that we don't allow the transactional nature of relationships
to surpass the transformative aspirations that we have in being involved in peacebuilding.
Thank you.