The collapse of the internationally backed government in Afghanistan in August 2021 made for dramatic news, but the inability of that intervention to achieve stability over the preceding two decades have been helping the peace community to recognize that many of their efforts in the Balkans, the Middle East and in Africa, have failed to generate sustainable peace and development.
As the experiences in Afghanistan and elsewhere have demonstrated, it is not possible to undertake a project, such as a community violence reduction initiative in Iraq or security sector reform in Somalia, and predict the outcome with any certainty. Nor can we use a model that has performed relatively well, for instance, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and repeat it elsewhere with the expectation that it will produce the same result.
This unpredictability and irreproducibility are characteristics of complex system behavior, not a result of insufficient knowledge or inadequate planning or implementation. International peace efforts have long suffered from an engineering inspired model in which international experts have the agency to diagnose a conflict, plan and execute a linear-causal step-by-step peace intervention that can ‘build’ peace and ‘fix’ failed states.
In contrast, social systems are complex, meaning they continuously adapt and self-organize based on non-linear positive and negative feedback dynamics. The implication for peacebuilders is that pathways for peace can not be pre-designed; peace needs to emerge and adapt from an iterative trial and error (learning by doing) experiential process rooted in a specific context and emerging from the agency and experiences of the affected society.
Adaptive Peace is specifically designed to cope with the unpredictability and irreproducibility inherent in complex social change processes. It is a process-facilitation approach where peacebuilders, together with the people affected by conflict, actively engage in an iterative process of inductive learning and adaptation.
Self-sustainable peace: the pivot from peace by expert design to peace emergent from resilience and adaptive capacity
Insights derived from how self-organization maintains and transforms complex systems suggests that for peace to become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions that promote and sustain peace need to emerge within the affected communities. The most effective context-specific approaches are those that emerge from the history, culture, and current reality of the people affected by conflict. There is a link between the extent to which a peace initiative is context-specific and adaptive, and the level of self-sustainability attained.
A society is peaceful when its social and state institutions can ensure that political and economic competition is managed without people resorting to violence to pursue their interests. For peace to be self-sustainable a society needs to have sufficiently robust social and state institutions to identify, channel, prevent and manage disputes peacefully.
International peacebuilders can assist in this process, but if they interfere too much, they disrupt the feedback processes critical for self-organization to emerge and to be sustained. Every time an external effort ‘solves a problem’ it denies internal social institutions an opportunity to learn from doing, including sometimes failing, and in so doing stimulating their own learning and adaptation. The more effective an international operation is in providing stability, e.g. in northern Mali, the less incentive there is for the ruling political elites to invest in the political settlements necessary to bring about self-sustainable peace.
An Adaptive Peace approach does not imply that expert or scientific knowledge is not important, but one needs to recognize the distinction between evidence-based advise and how to apply it in a specific social context. For example, the science may determine that you prevent the spread of COVID-19 by avoiding close contact between people, but how to achieve that it in a densely populated slum community is something you can only work out through adaptive practice and learning in partnership and collaboration with the affected community. The empowered agency of the people involved is critical for the effectiveness and sustainability of any peace initiative. Adaptive Peace is a conscious effort to decolonize peacebuilding by excluding predetermined models and standards and by empowering the agency of the affected communities to learn from their own attempts to sustain peace.
The implications for peacebuilders are that they should be sensitive to linear-assumptions and pre-determined models and standards when doing conflict analysis, planning, management, reporting and performance assessments of peace initiatives. Instead, they should invest in proactive experiential learning that can inform adaptative decision making processes. To the greatest extent possible in each context, the affected communities and societies should be involved in analysis, learning and co-managing those activities that are meant to support their efforts. Peace work need to pivot away from something that experts do for affected people and communities, to sets of activities that peacebuilders do in support of, and in collaboration with, people and community-driven initiatives.
Featured image: UN Security Council (Mark Garten / Flickr)
Cedric de Coning
Cedric de Coning is a Research Professor with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) where he co-directs the Center on UN and Global Governance, and he is a senior advisor and chief editor for the African Center for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD). He holds a PhD from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch (2012). He has served in a number of advisory capacities for the African Union and United Nations, including on the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board for the Peacebuilding Fund. He has co-edited 10 books, of which the most recent is ‘Adaptive Mediation and Conflict Resolution: Peace-making in Colombia, Mozambique, the Philippines, and Syria’ (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022). He tweets at @CedricdeConing.
