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. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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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. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
OxPeace Conference 2022: Who Builds Peace?
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. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
