OxPeace Conference 2022: Who Builds Peace?

Oxford University

OxPeace Conference 2022: Who Builds Peace? The Relationships between International, National, Regional, and Local Levels in Peacebuilding. The fourteenth annual OxPeace day conference.

Episodes

  1. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 4: Part 2

    Professor Cedric de Coning presents "Adaptive Peace: Coping with Complex Systems in Transition." Adaptive Peace is an approach to mediation and peacebuilding designed to cope with the uncertainty, unpredictability, and irreproducibility inherent in complex social change process. Complexity theory provides a theoretical framework for understanding how the resilience and adaptive capacity of social systems can be influenced to help them prevent, contain and recover from violent conflict. Insights derived from how self-organisation maintains and transforms complex systems suggests that for peace to become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions that promote and sustain peace need to emerge from within the culture, history and socio-ecological context of the relevant society. Peacebuilders can assist this process, but if they interfere too much, they cause harm by disrupting the feedback critical for self-organisation to emerge and to be sustained. The core lesson from the hybrid peace literature is that the empowered agency of the people involved is critical for the emergence and sustainability of any peace initiative. Adaptive Peace is a conscious effort to decolonize peacebuilding by placing the affected community in the driving seat of an iterative doing-whilst-learning process aimed at navigating the complexity inherent in trying to nudge social-ecological change processes towards sustaining peace, without causing harm.

    22 min
  2. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 3: Part 3

    Ufra Mir presents "Peace-psychology: a Frontline Practitioner Perspective from Kashmir, South Asia." As a frontline peace-psychology practitioner, Ufra works to: facilitate culturally-relevant, contextualized and decolonized approaches of healing & peacebuilding; counteract the enforced normalization and dehumanization of conflicts; create community safe and empathetic spaces for expression and dialogue; advocate for ‘mental is political’; and destigmatize emotional and mental health conversations in conflict zones. Focusing on the conference theme, ‘Who builds Peace?’ Ufra’s talk will further elaborate on these topics. Sharing reflections from her decade-long practice on the ground in Kashmir (and possibly other places in South and Southeast Asia), she will briefly talk about her individual efforts and initiatives through which she has been contributing to the community to which she belongs, which remains affected by armed-political conflict for decades now. She will reflect on what it entails psychologically to strive for ‘peace’, while living in and through one of the most intractable conflicts. Additionally, Ufra will briefly highlight the increasing need to integrate empathetic and holistic mental health and psychosocial support service (MHPSS) based wellbeing approaches into peacebuilding; including for peacebuilders on the ground, who often lack privilege and support systems to care for themselves amidst daily chaos.

    22 min
  3. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 2: Part 1

    Dr Liz Carmichael presents "Implementing peace: South Africa’s Peace Structures 1991-1994." When apartheid crumbled at the close of the 1980s, two major conflicts were gripping South Africa: that between the white minority government (with its security forces, police and army) and the majority population, and the low-intensity civil war which pitted Zulus loyal to the conservative Inkatha movement against ANC supporters in Natal and KwaZulu. With Mandela’s release and the unbanning of the liberation movements in February 1990 it was expected that two things would follow: the start of multi-party talks to devise a new non-racial constitution, and the cessation of the ANC-Inkatha war. Neither happened. Instead the ANC- Inkatha war spread to the industrial townships around Johannesburg, A crisis point in 1991 led to the negotiation of the National Peace Accord, facilitated by civil society (church and business leaders). To implement itself, the NPA set up a complete infrastructure for peace involving political organizations, civil society and the security forces, at national, regional and local levels. The country was divided into 11 regions, which formed over 260 local Peace Committees. Activities included conflict resolution, training, ‘marketing’ peace, peace monitoring to implement the NPA’s Codes of Conduct for political organizations and security forces, and socio-economic reconstruction and development. The peaceful election in April 1994 was in no small part due to the structures and their 18,500 peace monitors. Although many felt there was more peacebuilding to be done, the structures were dismantled at the end of 1994, except for maintaining a minimal provincial presence in KwaZulu-Natal until 2001. The NPA structures, which were entirely home-grown, remain the most comprehensive example of such an ‘Infrastructure for peace’ (I4P).

    23 min
  4. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 1

    Opening plenary and keynote addresses. Chair: Professor Richard Caplan, Associate Professor of International Relations, Oxford Professor John Paul Lederach presents: "The patient stitching of impermanent peace: Four evolutions along the personal journey" Across four decades, experience suggests that peace has remained elusive while the questions of who builds peace and how coordination among initiatives and actors in dynamic situations coheres has remained a constant challenge. Through personal reflection on practice and inductive theory-building, four emergent evolutions of thought will be explored around this reality of impermanence with its significant paradoxes, dilemmas, gaps, and what seems to constitute essential tenets of peacebuilding. Dr Thania Paffenholz presents: "Rethinking peacebuilding in a world out of order" The war in Ukraine is starkly illustrating that existing systems to build peace are out of order. Should they be adapted, or do we need a wholesale rethink of the notion of peacebuilding? I argue that we should radically reconsider fundamental concepts of peacebuilding like peace processes, tracks, and the binary notions of success and failure and of negative and positive peace in order to reach a reality-based understanding of peacebuilding as the recurrent renegotiation of the social and political contract of societies, policies, and states towards pathways to peace. We thereby need to embrace the reality of messiness, progress, and backlash, and never lose sight of our creativity and will to change what we can change. I will demonstrate this from my personal perspective as a researcher and practitioner with different examples including Ukraine.

    1h 19m

About

OxPeace Conference 2022: Who Builds Peace? The Relationships between International, National, Regional, and Local Levels in Peacebuilding. The fourteenth annual OxPeace day conference.