BLOG POST: Colombia’s Peace and Grassroots Peacebuilding
The Colombian Peace Agreement (CPA) is known to being the most inclusive peace deal to date, as several civil society organizations partook in the negotiation process and helped drafting the final agreement. Two years later into the peace building process, how inclusive is the implementation of Colombia’s peace? This article looks deeper into how Colombia’s national peace process relates to the existence of multiple grassroots initiatives in the country. Mainly, it explores how local and national peace building processes can complement each other.
VIDEO: Graeme Simpson of Interpeace: integrated lived experience and why young peacebuilders are ahead of the curve
In this video recording, Graeme Simpson of Interpeace and Stephen Gray of Adapt Peacebuilding discuss integrated lived experiences and youth lead peacebuilding. In particular, they focus on answering the question: why are young peacebuilders so ahead?
REPORT: Seeing in Systems, Working in Networks: Adapt Wins USAID Prize for Peacebuilding in Myanmar
Happy to announce that Adapt Peacebuilding won the 2018 USAID CLA Case Competition prize! Big congrats to our Myanmar colleagues. The full award winning case report is available for download.
This case describes a Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) approach in a highly conflict-affected region of northern Myanmar between 2013-16. A CLA approach was desirable in this area because it has highly fluid security, political, and humanitarian dynamics, and because access is restricted to international actors, and requires that all interventions are based on local knowledge and agency. The challenge that this case addressed was how local communities can sustainably drive their own peacebuilding and development outcomes with minimal international support, and in the midst of unpredictable and changing local dynamics.
ARTICLE: Adaptive Mediation
This article, by Cedric de Coning and Stephen Gray, appears in ACCORD‘s quarterly magazine Conflict Trends and introduces concepts and practices of adaptive mediation. Adaptive mediation is a set of principles and practices that are more suited to the challenges of mediation processes in complex environments. Adaptive mediation in the context of resolving interstate or intrastate armed conflicts recognises that uncertainty is an intrinsic quality of complex social systems, not a result of imperfect knowledge, inadequate planning or poor implementation. Adaptive mediation employs tools that anticipate complexity and help mediators of peace processes cope with uncertainty, setbacks and shocks.
VIDEO: Systemic Action Research for Peacebuilding
This video recording of a presentation by Stephen Gray to Fundación Ideas para la Paz focuses on Danny Burns’ Systemic Action Research methodology, and contrasts it to The Omidyar Group’s Systems Practice methodology. The presentation includes an overview of an experience using this particular bottom up peacebuilding method in Myanmar.
SLIDE DECK: Systemic Conflict Assessment of Myanmar’s Kachin Conflict
These presentation slides include a systemic conflict assessment of Myanmar’s Kachin conflict. The analysis considers politics, identity, history, and natural resources and reflects a more optimistic time.
POCKET GUIDE: Systems Archetypes at a Glance
This handy pocket guide reviews the eight basic systems archetypes, from “Drifting Goals” all the way to “Tragedy of the Commons.” For each archetype, this guide provides a causal loop template; a general description of how the structure works, and brief, bulleted tips for detecting and managing the unique dynamics that the archetype generates.
BLOG POST: Practical strategies for systems change in complex peacebuilding environments
This article argues that the distinctions we make in peacebuilding masks a messier, highly interdependent reality that we need to honestly engage with. We argue for a more holistic, systems view, and present three case studies of explicitly systemic peacebuilding strategies from Myanmar and Thailand. Reflection on these case studies offers insights for systemic theories of change, including engaging multiple parts of the system in parallel, rewiring relationships within the system, balancing adaptation and control, and building trust with donors to balance risk.
BLOG POST: Unpacking the complex causality so-called religious violence in Myanmar
A significant sub-system within the system relates to tensions between different religious and/or ethnic communities resulting from a lack of trust and positive interaction.
There are four important feedback loops which constitute this sub system. The first (R10) , is characterized by the fact that hate speech against Muslims (that employs stereotypes of Muslims as violent) reinforces the perception among non-Muslims that Islam is an inherently violent or aggressive religion. This perception in turn leads people to interpret social or inter-personal conflicts or crimes as religious conflicts (since they assume that Muslims are more likely to be aggressors and/or Islam to be incompatible with other religions). This contributes to the perception that religious conflict is rife, that Islam per se is the cause of the conflicts and/or that non-Muslims are at risk from attack by Muslims, which often results in hate speech against Muslims…
VIDEO: Peacemaking effectiveness: what can Myanmar learn from thirty years of international experience in peace process implementation
This work was produced and distributed ahead of the May 2017 national dialog process of Myanmar’s peace process. Based on international comparative evidence drawn from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies Peace Accords Matrix, the animation addressed contemporary peacemaking challenges in Myanmar.
