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“Co-inspira”: a systemic conversation inspiring local peacebuilding in Colombia

By
Alejandra Solarte and Milton Arteaga
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Cauca, Colombia is a region that has been plagued by long-standing conflicts among the government, armed groups, and indigenous communities, fueled by various factors such as land disputes, drug trafficking, and political violence. To address this, the community has created “Co-inspira,” a systemic action research project in Cauca, Colombia, facilitated by Adapt Peacebuilding (Adapt). The project brings together leaders from the Territorial Council for Peace, Coexistence, and Reconciliation (TCPCR) to engage in peacebuilding and acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for positive change in their communities. “Co-inspira” was designed with and for peace councilors, initially in El Tambo, Cauca, but has since expanded to 12 towns across the region.

In 2021, “Co-Inspira” was launched to pilot a systemic action research (SAR) process that would provide TCPCR councilors with a shared understanding of peacebuilding in their communities and inspire them to take action. Volunteer councilors collected real-life stories and developed a systemic map of peacebuilding opportunities. They then selected the most meaningful opportunities and developed a peacebuilding strategy to address them. A peacebuilding strategy involves creating a theory of change and an action plan that aligns with the community’s shared understanding, as identified through the systemic map.

Since then, TCPCR leaders have formed three action research groups, each with a specific focus derived from the previous opportunity analysis. The first group concentrates on women’s empowerment, the second on promoting youth leadership, and the third on protecting water. Each group is now in their second learning cycle, which ends with the refinement of their peacebuilding strategy based on feedback from community members and other research groups. This iterative process ensures that each group’s theory of change and action plan remains aligned with the community’s shared understanding, and that they continue to make progress towards achieving their peacebuilding goals.

The initial pilot process only included one 6-month learning cycle, and the second cycle commenced six months later. During this period, the groups were unable to maintain their research activities due to a significant obstacle in a largely rural town: the inability to meet face-to-face due to a lack of resources. The limited infrastructure in the area prevented the groups from conducting virtual meetings or even group calls. However, the project now has funding to continue for an additional two years, and a new SAR group has been established.

In its second phase, Co-inspira is now training through another SAR group. This new group was chosen with government officials, and in dialogue with TCPCR’s representatives. Four months into the new research, there are 24 researchers spread throughout Cauca. They have already gathered numerous stories and developed a shared understanding of “How to jointly build peace in the department of Cauca?” The councilors have completed a systemic map that graphically represents their collective answer. Now the researchers will show their collective knowledge to their local communities to take action soon. 

One of the biggest challenges faced by this group is to create meaningful peacebuilding initiatives in a territory where conflict is intensifying, the local government is in its final year, and the new national government has not yet established a local presence. Furthermore, the lack of infrastructure poses a significant obstacle; the main road connecting the south with the north has been closed for the past four months, making it challenging for the researchers to convene. To attend research training, they have to travel by boat, horse, or on foot, and sometimes, it takes two to three days to reach their destination. While the internet appears to be a long-term solution, for now, the researchers are making significant efforts to keep the process going.

In conclusion, the “Co-inspira” project is a promising and innovative approach to peacebuilding. By empowering local leaders to take action in their communities, the project is having a positive impact not just on peacebuilding, but also on the well-being of participants. As the project expands, it serves as a model for other regions looking to build peace from the ground up.

Cauca, Colombia ha sufrido largos conflictos entre el gobierno, grupos armados y comunidades indígenas, debido a factores como disputas territoriales, tráfico de drogas y violencia política. Para abordar esta situación, la comunidad ha creado el proyecto de investigación-acción-sistémica “Co-inspira” en Cauca, Colombia, facilitado por Adapt Peacebuilding (Adapt). El proyecto reúne a líderes del Consejo Territorial de Paz, Convivencia y Reconciliación (CTPCR) para involucrarse en la construcción de paz y adquirir las habilidades y conocimientos necesarios para un cambio positivo en sus comunidades. El proyecto se diseñó con y para los consejeros de paz, inicialmente en El Tambo, Cauca, pero desde entonces se ha expandido a 12 pueblos de la región.

En 2021, “Co-Inspira” se lanzó como piloto de un proceso de investigación-acción sistémica (SAR) que proporcionaría a los consejeros del CTPCR una comprensión compartida de la construcción de paz en sus comunidades y los inspiraría a tomar medidas. Los consejeros voluntarios recopilaron historias de la vida real y desarrollaron un mapa sistémico de oportunidades para la construcción de paz. Luego seleccionaron las oportunidades más significativas y desarrollaron una estrategia de construcción de paz para abordarlas. Una estrategia de construcción de paz implica crear una teoría del cambio y un plan de acción que se alinee con la comprensión compartida de la comunidad, identificada a través del mapa sistémico.

Desde entonces, los líderes del CTPCR han formado tres grupos de investigación-acción, cada uno con un enfoque específico derivado del análisis previo de oportunidades. El primer grupo se centra en el empoderamiento de las mujeres, el segundo en promover el liderazgo juvenil y el tercero en proteger el agua. Cada grupo está en su segundo ciclo de aprendizaje, que termina con la mejora de su estrategia de construcción de paz en función de los comentarios de los miembros de la comunidad y otros grupos de investigación. Este proceso iterativo garantiza que la teoría del cambio y el plan de acción de cada grupo sigan alineados con la comprensión compartida de la comunidad y que continúen avanzando hacia el logro de sus objetivos de construcción de paz.

El proceso piloto inicial solo incluyó un ciclo de aprendizaje de seis meses, y el segundo ciclo comenzó seis meses después. Durante este período, los grupos no pudieron mantener sus actividades de investigación debido a un obstáculo significativo en una ciudad predominantemente rural: la imposibilidad de reunirse cara a cara debido a la falta de recursos. La infraestructura limitada en la zona impidió que los grupos realizaran reuniones virtuales o incluso llamadas grupales. Sin embargo, el proyecto ahora tiene financiamiento para continuar durante dos años adicionales, y se ha establecido un nuevo grupo de SAR.

En su segunda fase, Co-inspira ahora se está capacitando a través de otro grupo SAR. Este nuevo grupo fue elegido con funcionarios del gobierno y en diálogo con los representantes de TCPCR. Cuatro meses después del nuevo proyecto de investigación, hay 24 investigadores distribuidos por todo el Cauca. Ya han recopilado numerosas historias y han desarrollado una comprensión compartida de “¿Cómo construir conjuntamente la paz en el departamento de Cauca?” Los concejales han completado un mapa sistémico que representa gráficamente su respuesta colectiva. Ahora, los investigadores mostrarán su conocimiento colectivo a sus comunidades locales para tomar medidas pronto.

Uno de los mayores desafíos que enfrenta este grupo es crear iniciativas significativas de construcción de paz en un territorio donde el conflicto se intensifica, el gobierno local está en su último año y el nuevo gobierno nacional aún no ha establecido una presencia local. Además, la falta de infraestructura presenta un obstáculo significativo; la carretera principal que conecta el sur con el norte ha estado cerrada durante los últimos cuatro meses, lo que dificulta la convocatoria de los investigadores. Para asistir a la capacitación de investigación, tienen que viajar en barco, a caballo o a pie, y a veces tarda dos o tres días en llegar a su destino. Aunque internet parece ser una solución a largo plazo, por ahora, los investigadores están haciendo esfuerzos significativos para mantener el proceso en marcha.

En conclusión, el proyecto “Co-inspira” es un enfoque prometedor e innovador para la construcción de paz. Al empoderar a los líderes locales para que tomen medidas en sus comunidades, el proyecto está teniendo un impacto positivo no solo en la construcción de paz, sino también en el bienestar de los participantes. A medida que el proyecto se expande, sirve como modelo para otras regiones que buscan construir la paz desde la base.

Image: Cauca (Bernard Gagnon)

Are Tech Companies Fueling Conflict in the DRC?

By
Ruth Omar and John Simms
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The ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over mineral resources has drawn attention to the potential role of tech companies in the crisis. As demand for cobalt and coltan use by big tech continues to grow, there are concerns that this demand is fueling the violence. This is made worse because of the documented use of child labor in the mines and the child soldiers used by rebel groups to fight for control. Peace News spoke with experts and DRC civilians about these issues to better understand what’s driving the conflict and how both local and international peacebuilders can help resolve these problems.

Experts interviewed: Paul Nantulya & Judith Verweijen

Limits of Peace Media on the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

By
Arthur Atanesyan
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The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is a dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (Artsakh) itself, historically populated by an Armenian majority. Besides the three parties to the conflict, there are global and regional players involved including Russia, Turkey, Iran, the U.S. and the EU (as well as European countries like France). 

In general, media framing of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is oriented toward violence and confrontation. However, there have been initiatives involving peace journalism since the 1994 ceasefire from regional media agencies and local initiatives by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and small private media agencies. These efforts commonly focus on storytelling about ordinary people in and around the conflict zone. Peace journalism initiatives about the Karabakh conflict are either carried out by practicing journalists with their individual field stories, or various websites, blogs and talk-shows interested in the human aspects of interaction with an opponent. Our study on the limits of peace journalism in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict demonstrates that there is more scope for peace media and peace journalism as alternative media coverage than what is currently occurring. This is especially the case in states with free or partly free media and Internet versus those with restrictions and sanctions, such as those that imprison journalists. Democratic states do not guarantee a wide spectrum of possibilities for peace journalism either, but they at least create the necessary preconditions for an alternative and more balanced and unbiased media framing of armed conflicts (especially if distant from the conflict region). 

There have been a number of attempts to implement peace journalism and media in relation to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in recent decades. One relatively successful attempt at peace media was the project Front Line – TV bridges between the capitals of Armenia and Azerbaijan (Yerevan and Baku). The project was implemented by the international organization Internews. For six months (November 2000 – April 2001) the Prometheus (Armenia) and ANS (Azerbaijan) TV channels  broadcast the show to  five million viewers via interactive video dialogues between representatives of both countries – varying from politicians to sportsmen. 

Another attempt to bring together journalists from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic to find common narratives about the everyday life of ordinary people was a project called Unheard Voices, launched in 2014 through International Alert. In March 2015, a group of journalists and scholars from the South Caucasus met in Tbilisi with the aim of developing a code of ethics for journalists covering conflicts in the region. The code was jointly prepared during this meeting and further developed with feedback from a wide range of journalists. The principles of conduct, both ethically and methodologically, adhered to the philosophy of peace journalism. More recently, in July 2018, the journalist Anna Hakobyan (spouse of the prime minister of Armenia, and chief editor of The Armenian Times news agency) launched the campaign Women for Peace, aiming at a dialogue among women leaders and activists of the societies involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Hakobyan’s campaign became a media-event and was well covered by the media not only in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, but also in Azerbaijan. The message of Women for Peace campaign aimed at shifting the focus from the interests of one of the conflict parties to the interests of a group of women in the societies involved in the conflict. Hakobyan implicitly used the toolkit of peace journalism with the aim of ensuring a dialogue between the societies involved in the conflict, and created another example of how the impartiality of peace journalism can be combined with peace advocacy. At the institutional and state level, peace journalism would achieve more attention if constantly practiced, incorporated pragmatically into news routines, and if it could show positive change for peacebuilding efforts.

Featured image: Flag (Adam Jones)

Women’s empowerment and peacebuilding in Boko Haram-affected regions

By
Eugenie Rose Fontep
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When women are employed, research shows that they participate more in the peacebuilding process in Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria regions affected by Boko Haram attacks. This is measured by two main activities, either (i) their willingness to handle, prevent and resolve violent community disputes or conflicts, or (ii) willingness to participate in meetings to  reduce crime in the community.

While Niger has the highest share (67% on average) of women engaged in meetings aiming to handle, prevent, and resolve community disputes,  Cameroon and Nigeria have the lowest at 50%. Lack of employment opportunities for women might explain why they have been active participants in armed rebel groups over recent decades. Women members of Boko Haram comprise more than two-thirds of the group’s suicide attackers and killed more than 1,200 people between 2014 and 2018. In Nigeria, the most deadly incident in 2018 involved three women bombers who killed twenty people in a crowded marketplace.

Offering employment opportunities to women is essential for reducing their likelihood to participate in violence and increase their willingness to promote peace. Policies aiming to speed up women’s transition from unemployment to at least part-time jobs are likely to have a greater effect on supporting peacebuilding. 

Women empowerment policies might also play a key role in such a context where women’s human capital is weak as parents fear sending their girl child to school to avoid kidnapping at the school place. In this sense, one way to consolidate peace might be to allocate conditional cash transfers which will be used to empower women through the creation of a new business or to support an existing one. Tax subsidies in favor of firms hiring a certain share of women might also be of great importance. Since women will be busy working either part-time or full-time, they become less vulnerable to terrorist group recruitment.

Featured images: First image (Anouk Delafortrie / Flickr), Second image (Ryan Brown / Flickr)

Adaptive Peace: Insights from complexity for preventing violence and sustaining peace

By
Cedric de Coning
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United Nations Security Council

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)

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