Reflecting on Bottom-up Peacebuilding Methodologies in Myanmar (Peace News)
Adapt Peacebuilding and the Relief Action Network for IDPs and Refugees (RANIR) have pioneered a civil society-led peacebuilding process in Myanmar, utilizing an adaptive peacebuilding methodology called Systemic Action Research (SAR). This approach allows local participants to determine the topics to be worked on, outcomes expected, who can participate, and when activities should be completed. The SAR approach has been implemented in the armed conflict in Myanmar’s north between the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and its allies and the Myanmar military. The SAR approach includes training in systemic inquiry, a process of participatory data collection and analysis. The process identified three priority peacebuilding topics: drug abuse, the right of return for refugees and internally displaced people, and social cohesion between host communities and internally displaced people. More than 17,000 people were directly involved in the process, and the potential of seeing peacebuilding as a process of social mobilization has been demonstrated.
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…
BLOG POST: Open Source your Analysis: Participatory Approaches to Systems Mapping
People living and working on complex systems, which is pretty much all of us, find ourselves baffled and inspired in equal measures by their unpredictable behavior. Complex systems, be they storm systems (environmental), the endocrine system (biological), or the dancefloor at your office Christmas party (social), can be impossible to predict, let alone control. As thinkers such as Easterly and Taleb argue, we should treat with great scepticism anyone who tells you that they can.
