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/
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/
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/
