Good afternoon, everyone.
And also to our listeners online, if there are still any thank you for your resilience to stay with us up to this this late hour.
I'm going to to talk to you about adaptive mediation and.
I'm focussing in on mediation because it's kind of a microcosm of what we're talking about when we talk more broadly about peace processes.
And so I think although I'm going to focus in on mediation,
I hope that you can scale it in your minds also when we talk about peace processes more broadly.
And of course, I want to link it to our question, which is about who builds peace.
And I think when we when we talk about who builds peace, it's of course.
For me, an important and many people have mentioned it today that it's really about striking the right balance between those who are affected by
conflict and those who are there to help those affected by conflict who deal with with the conflict that they are that they're engaging with.
And this is not black and white. This is obviously a spectrum with very many different actors and levels on that spectrum.
We spoke today about, I think Jean-Paul Mensen used the words entangled embedded.
If we think about these relationships that we are talking about between those
who are affected by conflict and those who are helping in one or other way.
We can also think in terms of scales or circuits.
And this is where I think another issue that came up a couple of times today is important is the fact that although we may be focussing, for instance,
in dealing with a particular conflict with a community affected by that conflict,
they are, of course, not able to at that level bring about change at other levels.
So maybe at the regional national international level,
although there are things happening at those level that have an influence on the local conflict, right?
So as peacebuilding, especially that that can.
And move between these different levels or that are located at different levels, so for instance,
a someone like Jonathan who's sitting in in London dealing with somebody in a field office is dealing with somebody in a local community.
That kind of organisation can work at all these different levels.
And I think one of the most important thing we as international peace builders can do is to,
first of all, deal with peacebuilding in our jurisdiction and our level look at.
We may not have a lot of leverage or influence about what's happening in the local community, where we are maybe trying to help.
But certainly we should have much more influence and leverage in our own communities where we are located in terms of
reducing harm that our communities could be and could be causing in these local communities that we're working with.
One thing I want to maybe preface also my discussion on adaptive mediation about is that.
When we talk about mediation, I think we can distinguish between many different types of mediation.
Ukraine is very much, for instance, at the front of our minds at the moment, and we think about mediation in in a conflict situation like Ukraine.
It is about trying to bring an end to the conflict, trying to bring an end to the suffering, using a very broad range of tools.
And it's about dealing with some parties,
typically in this kind of conflict situation that still believe they can achieve more through violence than through peace.
And that's a very different mediation than a mediation where you are engaging with parties that have
reached a point of ripeness where they recognise what Darkman calls a mutual hurting stalemate,
or where they recognise that they can't achieve their objectives through violence, they have to switch to seeking a mediated solution.
So a lot of what I want to say now about adaptive mediation is really about that second
type of mediation setting because their goal is to find a self-sustainable peace,
not to find not to bring an end to the conflict using any means of leverage that we can.
And it speaks a little bit,
perhaps to the difference between negative peace and positive peace that we also mentioned at various times during our discussion today.
And maybe the one thing I would like to say there is that I think we sometimes I think it's very useful concepts,
but we sometimes think of them too much as a kind of a chronological dimension.
I think Jean-Paul also mentioned this morning that these things are happening at the same time.
And I think especially when you think about sustaining a negative peace that
is impossible to do without many elements of positive peace being present.
So I think these two are more closely interlinked and then than we often think of.
Of course, it's interesting from a kind of analytical perspective to try to make that distinction.
But the core puzzle I want to share with you and discuss with you and I talk about adaptive mediation is that over the last few decades,
our attempt to professionalise mediation, I think, have had a number of side effects or negative unintended consequences.
One of them is that. Our focus has shifted from a occupation with the conflict and the people involved,
the parties to the conflict, to the mediator, to mediation, to peace agreements.
We have created a lot of expectations of of what we think mediators should achieve,
what a peace agreement should contain the ethics that the mediators should bring to them to the mediation table.
And I think the result is that many of the peace agreements that have been adopted or
many of the actions that we take when it comes to how we engage with peace processes,
if I make it a bit more broadly broader, reflects more what our expectations are of.
Peace then. What they say about the local context or the interests of the parties to the conflict.
I think in many cases, mediators and their teams have had so much influence over the process and the
content of the agreements reached that the parties to the conflict and the
people affected by the conflict don't recognise themselves and their experiences
and concerns in the content of the agreement or the content of the process.
And of course, as a result, many of the peace agreements adopted or agreed to in these kind of contexts collapse soon after they've been adopted.
And that is why I've had this interest to really try to understand and think about how can we make these peace agreements?
Or then more broader, this peace process is more sustainable, more self-sustainable self-sustainable, meaning that they are sustained, implemented,
maintained, further developed by the people involved in the conflict,
not as a result of external or international influence or support or encouragement.
And this this brings me to this concept of adaptive mediation,
which is a specific approach to mediation that is based on a recognition that the social systems
that we are trying to influence through mediation or broader peace processes are complex.
In other words, they are emergent, they are dynamic, they are nonlinear and therefore they are.
They are inherently uncertain and unpredictable. You've mentioned this morning going to the Moon,
so I want to use this distinction between something that is complicated and something that is complex by referring to travelling to space.
I think we all think that we have this kind of common reference that we make that if if we want to say that what we are doing is not very difficult.
We're saying it's not rocket science, right? Rocket science is very complicated, you need a lot of different types of knowledge to design spaceships,
to design how they should be launched and their velocities, etcetera, etcetera,
but once you've been able to effect that, you can do that over and over again.
In fact, I think the rocket that has been used most up to now to send people into space is
the Soyuz rockets that's essentially been unchanged in design since the 1960s.
It's. That's complicated, it's difficult, but it's complicated, complex like social systems mean that we, for instance, like we heard today,
we have something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or the National
Peace Accords that it's worked relatively well in a place like South Africa.
But we cannot replicate it anywhere else, necessarily.
We cannot even replicate it in South Africa today because of the different context that it is in.
So this unpredictability, uncertainty and reproducibility are inherent characteristics of complex systems.
And that's why peace is so much more difficult to deal with.
So next time people belittle our work and say it's not rocket science,
you can go back and tell them our work is much more complex than rocket science.
So this this recognition of complexity, I think, has a number of implications for how we approach our work in peace processes then,
but also then especially how we deal with mediation. And I'll I'll focus in on three implications.
Firstly, this uncertainty and unpredictability mean that we cannot use a deductive theory
of change when we try to influence social systems or social change processes.
But I mean, with that is because we cannot predict what's going to happen.
We cannot design a theory of change with linear step by step chronological interventions,
which with any certainty is going to produce the result that we intended to have.
And this is how. I'll use Graeme's 90 percent.
This is how 90 percent of of of our peace processes are designed.
Right. Because when we apply for money, we are forced to come up with a theory of change that shows the funder that we
have a high degree in convinced the Thunder that if we take the following steps,
we're going to have the following results. I would say that to cope with complexity, we need to use an inductive approach,
which basically means that we need we don't know what's going to work, so we need to try a variety of things.
As we when we try a variety of things, you can call it experimentation if you like, or exploration of different interventions.
We need to track those very closely and see which effects they have, which means we need a very, relatively short, iterative cycle of reflection.
I've been part of a team that designed a performance assessment system for UN peacekeeping operations,
and they use a four month cycle to do this kind of reflective process, right?
So you need to judge which of those interventions or steps or actions that you are taking
is having the kind of desired effect that you want to have and which ones are not.
And you have to stop doing those that are not working and maybe expand and work more,
bring in more diversity and those that seem to have the desired effect.
And one thing that's important to remember in this context is that something that may be working today and tomorrow
is most likely not going to work next week or next month because the systems we are engaging with is proactive,
conscious human beings that are constantly reacting to how we are engaging with the social system.
And if what we are doing is having such an effect that for which there will be winners and losers because we are trying to change,
bring about such an change in that society,
people will react and find ways to to circumvent or go around or find different ways to try to do what they
would like to do and therefore even those things that we've come up with in our interventions that seem to work.
We need to keep monitoring because we will need to keep diversifying and keep, keep evolving those as well as we go along.
And that's also why it's important when we talk about peace agreements to think and understand
that a self-sustainable peace agreement is also an evolving peace agreement or something,
at least that can manage during its implementation process with a changing and continuous evolving situation.
So that's where the adaptive and adaptive mediation and adaptive peace comes
from this this need to continuously attempt to explore different interventions,
monitor them very closely, reflect on how they're doing.
Introducing new adaptations, understanding that this is a continuous iterative cycle that will never stop.
We're not going to arrive at some point with the solution.
We need to continuously co evolve with the changing situation as we go along.
So the second implication I want to talk about of complexity and unpredictable
predictability for mediation processes has to do with the ownership of the peace agreement.
When we were. Thinking that as experts,
we had this knowledge about peace and peacebuilding that we could bring to communities affected by conflict meant
that we had some kind of a privileged experience and knowledge that we could teach or lead communities and process.
But if we recognise the social complexity of what we working with and we recognise that there
isn't in a way of determining exactly what process will work or what the outcome will be.
I think this shows us that the the value and the role of the communities you working with in terms of the knowledge that
they have is at least equal to the rock through the role that international contributors to peace may or may not have.
So to think much more in terms of breaking down this hierarchy of inequality between international peace builders or external peacefulness,
people who have peacebuilding as a profession and local communities we are engaging with.
But there's another, I would say,
even more important reason to think about the local ownership and the involvement of local communities, and that is that.
Because the process of what we the content of what we're dealing with when we come into
engaging with peace processes or mediation processes have to be context specific,
have to relate to the culture and history and realities and interests of the people involved in the conflict.
It has to emerge from the process from themselves.
It can be an engagement and they were, of course, the role that mediators and external actors play.
Jonathan, I think, spoke very eloquently about the various different contributions that external
peace builders or mediators can bring to a process and the limitations that.
Communities or people affected by conflict may have in terms of their ability to perhaps overcome some of their challenges and so forth.
But taking all of that into account, we are not going to arrive at a self-sustainable peace process if the content of that peace
process or peace agreement has not been generated by the people engaged in the process.
If the content comes from the mediators, then we will see the kind of relax and peace agreements that we've seen before.
So that is a critical element if we want to achieve self-sustainable peace agreements or peace processes.
Lastly, the role of the mediator has to because of this importance of the.
Parties affected by the conflict, the parties to the mediation because of their importance in the process.
The last thing I want to emphasise is then the role of the mediator. What is the appropriate role of the mediator or the peaceful?
I would say that it's important that that role should be limited to process facilitation.
And it's difficult to put a hard line on it.
Of course, that needs interpretation in different situations.
But the what I would try to say is that mediators peacefulness should stop short of providing content.
Content needs to come, the process can come from the mediators with content needs to come from the local context,
from the engagement, from a selfie emerging process of of the engagement of the local actors or the parties to a mediation.
So adaptive mediation is a specific approach to mediation designed to cope with the complexity and
to generate peace processes and peace agreements that are locally grounded and self sustainable.
That, to me, is the essence of what I'm trying to convey when I talk about adaptive mediation or adaptive peace process.
Am I doing on time? OK, I'll just wrap up in.
So one thing is, I know when I talk about it in the way that I spoke to you about it now, it could sound quite theoretical.
But I want to bring it down to a practical example.
I think one one example we heard today that really inspired me in this process as well is the the National Peace Accord
and the kind of infrastructures for peace that came out of this African experience that Liz told us about earlier today.
And that was, of course, not designed as an adaptive process.
But I think in reality,
it really shows the the content of the of the type of process that I'm describing because you had at the local community on a continuous basis,
key actors from the local community coming together, whether it's religious leaders,
mayors of town, community leaders, the pull, the head of the police,
the army, if they were around and other all kinds of other community leaders that came
together on a continuous basis to either respond to a particular challenge that
has emerged from the community or that as a discussing the fault lines that they
may see and try to prevent future disputes from arising in their communities.
And this is something that is happening irritably all the time,
and that is something happening all the country and then generating information up to the regional and national levels.
And so for me, that's a very practical example of a process that is very iterative.
That is learning that is trying different ways of managing this crisis,
that they are experiencing and learning from that and bringing them forward to the next iteration.
The lessons learnt from the previous experience. So that's maybe one of the the examples you can you can keep in your mind when you
think about how this kind of adaptive peace adaptive mediation process can be.
Imagined in everyday will let me stop there, thank you very much.