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/
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). 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/
