Despite significant efforts, the African Union, United Nations, and others have failed to stop violent conflict from recurring in many places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali and Sudan, to name a few. Very often, these efforts have only managed to address symptomatic factors that appear effective in the short term, but before long, violence reappears because the mainstream methodologies to resolve these conflicts seem unable to transform the underlying causes and drivers of conflict.
Driven by the need to improve how we prevent conflict and sustain peace amidst increasing uncertainty, new risks, and mounting complexity, our new book – Adaptive Peacebuilding: A New Approach to Sustaining Peace in the 21st Century – analyses peacebuilding effectiveness by comparing top-down, linear and prescriptive approaches, with adaptive, context-specific and participatory methodologies across eight case studies covering Africa (Mozambique and South Sudan), Asia (Mindanao), the Middle East (Palestine and Syria), and Latin America (Colombia).
Adaptive Peacebuilding
Our starting assumption is that, for peace to be self-sustainable, a society needs to have sufficiently strong national and local social institutions to identify, channel and manage disputes and social tensions peacefully. In this context, peacebuilding has a very specific objective, namely, to help a society prevent violent conflict, by supporting their efforts to develop resilient social institutions, that can manage and resolve emerging conflicts – i.e. sustain peace – before they turn violent.
However, there is an inherent tension in the act of promoting a process of self-sustainability from outside the society or community in question. Too much external interference will undermine the ability of social systems to self-organise and interrupt their ability to develop their own social institutions. Instead, this kind of peacebuilding generates dependency. We argue that this overreach is one of the reasons why peacebuilding has not been able to be more effective.
The Adaptive Peacebuilding approach provides a methodology for navigating this dilemma.
It has its foundation in complexity science that recognises that social systems are complex and thus highly dynamic and non-linear. This means that their behaviour is inherently uncertain and unpredictable. In other words, we cannot know beforehand with certainty, what kind of peacebuilding support will help generate self-sustainable peace in a specific context.
We cannot use engineering design assumptions when we work with people and social complexity. #Peacebuilding is much more complex than rocket science.
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In South Africa, innovations like the National Peace Accord and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were relatively successful in helping to ensure a peaceful transition at the end of Apartheid. Peacebuilders wanted to replicate this success, but despite serious efforts they were not able to reproduce the same results. This is because the key to the success of these innovations are that they have emerged in a particular context out of the active engagement of the people involved – they were not imported from elsewhere or imposed by peacebuilders. However, they were informed by the experiences and lessons that can be derived from what others tried elsewhere. This is an important distinction.
This irreproducibility of context specific outcomes is a key indicator of complexity. It stands in contrast with engineering or rocket science, where once you have solved a particular problem, you can apply the solution again and again and expect to get the same result. We cannot use engineering design assumptions when we work with people and social complexity. Peace is much more complex than rocket science.
To understand conflict dynamics in this social context, and to try to bring about a change in behaviour, that can prevent violence, we need an approach that can cope with social complexity. The ‘adaptive’ in Adaptive Peacebuilding, refers to the methodology that nature uses to cope with complexity, namely an inductive and adaptive process that is based on iterative, i.e. repeating, cycles of learning from doing. Learning from exploring different ways of supporting peace, and continuously adapting our actions, based on the feedback generated by our actions.
The ‘adaptive’ in Adaptive Peacebuilding, also refers to the recognition that peace is an emergent process – i.e. peace is generated and sustained by the active engagement of the people involved in working for peace. Adaptive Peacebuilding is thus a collaborative process where the affected society or community needs to have the primary agencyto determine the objectives, processes and outcomes of a peace process. The role of peacebuilders – whether they are local, national, regional or international, needs to be limited to process facilitation and support.
When people affected by conflict feel that they have been involved in shaping the peace, they also feel a sense of responsibility to sustain the institutions and processes necessary to sustain the peace.
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Nature also copes with complexity by introducing variety and by distributing decision-making across networks, and that is why in Adaptive Peacebuilding we use a similar networked approach that engages the broadest possible set of stakeholders – horizontally across the society, and vertically – local to global – in the peacebuilding process.
To test what complexity theory and Adaptive Peacebuilding suggests, with what we know from our past experience with actual peacebuilding processes, we tested the theory in the eight cases covered in the book.
Overall Findings
Overall, all the case study chapters found that top-down, determined-design and technocratic approaches were less effective than context-specific, locally-driven, and adaptive approaches to managing and resolving conflicts and sustaining peace. The context-specific approaches that were most effective were those that were rooted in the history, culture and current experienced reality of the people affected by conflict.
The adaptive approaches identified in the case studies were more effective when the affected community and stakeholders participated in, and were actively engaged in all aspects of the peace process. When people affected by conflict felt that they have been involved in shaping the peace, they also felt a sense of responsibility to sustain the institutions and processes necessary to sustain the peace. Our overall conclusion is thus that there is a link between the extent to which a peace initiative is context-specific, participatory and adaptive, and its self-sustainability.
Dr Cedric de Coning is a senior advisor to ACCORD and a research professor with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). He has co-edited Adaptive Peacebuilding: A New Approach to Sustaining Peace in the 21st Century together with Dr. Rui Saraiva and Dr. Ako Muto, as part of a project initiated by the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s (JICA) Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development. The project has also produced another edited volume: Adaptive Mediation and Conflict Resolution: Peacemaking in Colombia, Mozambique, the Philippines and Syria. Both books have been published by Palgrave MacMillan and are available open access through Springer, so that anyone can read or download this research for free.
