OxPeace Conference 2022: Who Builds Peace‪?‬ Oxford University

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. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Professor Phil Clark presents "Multi-Level Peacebuilding in the Covid-19 Era." Covid-19 has had profound – but vastly unequal – socio-economic consequences across the globe. This includes exacerbating the drivers of mass conflict in many settings, even societies that have seemingly enjoyed long periods of peace. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Rwanda in early 2021, at the height of the pandemic, as part of a longer study on the links among post-genocide inequality, welfare and reconciliation, this presentation will highlight the need to re-examine some core features of peacebuilding and transitional justice in the Covid context. This includes reconsidering the relations among international, national and community-level peacebuilding actors and their ability, in a complementary and durable fashion, to address the systemic causes of violence in the wake of all-encompassing shocks such as a global health crisis. Moving beyond the specific Rwandan case, this research provides insights into the multi-level nature of peacebuilding as well as the importance of care, intimacy and socio-economic equality in pursuing sustainable peace.

Graeme Simpson presents "‘Countering the Violence of Exclusion’: From Policy to Delivery of the Youth, Peace and Security Agenda." This presentation will briefly canvass the evolution of the global policy on youth, peace and security and some of the issues of exclusion, embedded stereotypes, trust deficits and ‘policy panic’ that it has sought to address. It will go on to review some of the seismic shifts that ‘meaningful inclusion’ of young people demands of the peacebuilding sector and will review the implementation and attempts at ‘localization’ of this framework, including an outline of some of the gaps and opportunities in addressing the aspirations of young women and men at national and local levels. The presentation will explore the transversal roles, attributes and hurdles of inclusive and intersectional youth-based peacebuilding across sectors, typologies of violence, phases of peace and conflict, and from the local to the global levels. It will conclude with a brief outline of the prevention potential of transformative youth resilience at all these levels, with an eye on the prevailing challenges of digital technologies, systemic (racial) injustice, the imperative of decolonization of the peacebuilding field, and the existential threat of climate change. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Professor Julia Paulson presents "Tensions and opportunities in peace education." This presentations explores some of the tensions and opportunities in peace education opened by the conference theme ‘Who builds peace? The relationships between the international, the national, region and local levels in peacebuilding.’ In particular, it explores tensions between international humanitarian approaches to education, which apply humanitarian neutrality to education, and activist education initiatives, which often start from an acknowledgement of the deeply political nature of education. The presentation also explores the tendency, at international and national levels, to focus peace education interventions on curricular change as opposed to structural reforms of education despite the fact that these reforms may do more to address the root causes of conflict and violence. Throughout the presentation, examples are drawn from the creative work of colleagues in the Education, Justice and Memory network (EdJAM) to develop new approaches for teaching and learning about the violent past in order to build more just futures. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Jonathan Cohen presents "A Practitioner Perspective: International Support to Local Peacebuilding." Peacebuilding experience has evolved in recent years as partnerships between local, national and international NGOs have developed more nuanced relationships. The solutions and agency to transform conflict lie primarily within societies experiencing conflict, but have to be situated in ever present geo-political power dynamics. This presentation will draw on experience of work on the South Caucasus, Kashmir and West Africa to examine how an INGO has evolved its practice through an accompaniment approach to support flexible, adaptive and long-term peacebuilding. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/