OxPeace Conference 2022: Who Builds Peace?

Oxford University
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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 4: Part 1

    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.

    24 min

  3. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 3: Part 4

    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.

    22 min

  4. 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

  5. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 3: Part 2

    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.

    17 min

  6. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 3: Part 1

    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.

    20 min

  7. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 2: Part 4

    Raja Karthikeya presents "Afghanistan & Iraq: Empirical approaches to Community-level Peacebuilding." Community-level peacebuilding has found praise in recent decades, but how it tangibly connects to national level peacebuilding has been under-discussed. How can community peacebuilding reframe national political debates? In a country in conflict, how does peacebuilding in the hinterland, far from the frontlines, affect larger reconciliation? What approaches can help leverage composite identities of a people in conflict for peacebuilding? How can tangible short-term outcomes such as protection of civilians and return of displaced populations be achieved through community peacebuilding? How can external actors empower grassroots peacebuilders? How does knowledge sharing between community peacebuilders working in geographically-disparate conflicts enhance local peace outcomes? Using the background of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq over the period 2011-17, this presentation shares empirical learning from community peacebuilding efforts and suggests approaches to community peacebuilding for a range of stakeholders.

    22 min

  8. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 2: Part 3

    Professor Brandon Hamber presents "Tripping, falling, yapping: How the Northern Ireland peace process never reached its potential?" The paper takes its title from a well-known Seamus Heaney poem, Follower. In the poem, the narrator relates how his father expertly ploughs a field while his son (presumably Heaney) makes a nuisance of himself "tripping, falling and yapping" while following his father. The poem ends with Heaney relating how the cycle repeats, and now the father stumbles behind his son, holding him back. This paper argues that despite many achievements, most notably a dramatic decrease in political deaths, the cycle of a stumbling peace process continues 25 years later. The ongoing cycle of division with all the hallmarks of the "tripping, falling, yapping" of the past remains. This is the result of multiple factors. These include the separation of institution-building from people-to-people peacebuilding, and the failure to change underlying social divisions and narratives. This has left the process continually underachieving and unprepared for social and political changes such as Brexit. The lessons from Northern Ireland, and what this means for the future and other peace processes, are discussed.

    17 min

  9. 06/10/2022

    OxPeace 2022 Session 2: Part 2

    Andrei Gomez-Suarez presents "Multilevel Infrastructures for Peace: The Case of Colombia." The 2016 Colombian peace agreement ended a fifty-two-year war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). According to the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, it is the most comprehensive peace agreement to date. It established national, regional and local infrastructures to formulate development plans in Colombia's sixteen most conflict-affected regions, a coca crop substitution programme, political reform measures to ensure the political participation of marginalised sectors of society, the political, economic and social reintegration of former FARC combatants with security guarantees, and the satisfaction of victims' rights to truth, justice, reparations and non-recurrence. It also created international peace infrastructures to aid implementation, monitor progress, and offer recommendations. These multilevel infrastructures for peace have been fundamental for building sustainable peace, despite the rocky implementation of the peace agreement after the arrival of a new government bent on reforming it 2018. In this talk I outline six infrastructures (Rural Development Plans, Coca Crop Substitution Programme, the National Reincorporation Council, the Truth Commission, the Peace Tribunal, and the UN Mission to Colombia) which, amid rising violence, have so far halted the return of full-scale war.

    18 min

  10. 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

  11. 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
  • 11 Episodes

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

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