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"This book investigates the ways in which young people engage with and contribute to civil society, community development and local peacebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa. Youth engagement and contribution to civil society and local peacebuilding can play a crucial role in development, however there is often a lack of effective engagement, policies and opportunities for young people in policy and practice. This book analyses their experiences of civic engagement and community participation and the challenges they face, across diverse areas including youth empowerment, freedom of expression, mobilisation, ideologies, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Drawing on cases from Yemen, Syria, Iran, Morocco and the Palestinian Territories, this book offers new insights on how youth are not only are shaped by, but also react to policies, conflict and constraints and challenges. The insights drawn from this interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to researchers of civil society, youth, peacebuilding and development, as well as to policymakers, donors, and NGO staff"--

"This book investigates the ways in which young people engage with and contribute to civil society, community development and local peacebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa. Youth engagement and contribution to civil society and local peacebuilding can play a crucial role in development, however there is often a lack of effective engagement, policies and opportunities for young people in policy and practice. This book analyses their experiences of civic engagement and community participation and the challenges they face, across diverse areas including youth empowerment, freedom of expression, mobilisation, ideologies, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Drawing on cases from Yemen, Syria, Iran, Morocco and the Palestinian Territories, this book offers new insights on how youth are not only are shaped by, but also react to policies, conflict and constraints and challenges. The insights drawn from this interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to researchers of civil society, youth, peacebuilding and development, as well as to policymakers, donors, and NGO staff"--

The study investigates initiatives for reconciliation and "dealing with the past" which were undertaken by international organisations, legal institutions and local civil society actors in response to the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The coherence of objectives and strategies and their implications for peacebuilding, forms of cooperation and learning experiences, and the political resonance of the various approaches were a particular focus of interest. The research concentrated on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia, which are linked by their history of ethnopolitical conflict and are signatory states to the Dayton Peace Agreement (1995), under which they committed to cooperate in order to overcome the effects of war. The inter-country case study was carried out with input from local partners from civil society organisations and academic institutions. In all, 150 interviews were conducted in 28 municipalities.

"While there is an increasing number of articles and studies identifying lessons from the record of UN peacebuilding operations, it is striking how little we know about the UN's very capacity for organizational learning on peacebuilding, and about learning in international organizations in general. This pilot study seeks to lay the foundations for an in-depth investigation of the UN's record on organizational learning. Our study is motivated by both, a research and a policy imperative. On the research front, studying organizational learning within the UN peacebuilding bureaucracy contributes to opening up the 'black box' of international organizations. So far, mainstream work in the discipline of International Relations (IR) has produced surprisingly few studies on the everyday workings of international organizations, let alone their ability to learn. Studying organizational learning calls for an interdisciplinary approach bringing together IR (including peace and conflict studies), public management and the sociology of organizations. This has the potential of advancing conceptual debates within the discipline of IR. The study proceeds in three steps. The first step surveys the relevant literature from different disciplines and concludes that peace research, IR and organization theory do not offer ready-made frameworks for the analysis of organizational learning in international organizations. Building on existing research, we identify key elements of a new framework starting with a definition of the key term, organizational learning: We define organizational learning "as a process of cognitive change through the questioning of the means and/or ends of addressing problems. The process manifests itself in the development and implementation of new rules and routines guiding the organization's actions." In a second step, we survey the evolution of the "infrastructure of learning" in the UN peacebuilding bureaucracy over the past 15 years. We hold that a number of factors (lack of will both within member states and the UN Secretariat as well as the lack of resources and appropriate incentive structures) contributed to the very slow recognition of the UN's learning needs. Major crises (such as the soul-searching after Rwanda and Srebrenica) plus the Brahimi Report in 2000 provided a certain momentum that brought the need to build up the UN's learning capacity higher on the agenda. Still, a lot of work remains to be done. In a third step, we present a list of variables that influence learning that need to be considered in a future in-depth study. This list of factors includes power, organizational culture, leadership, human capital, staff mobility, knowledge management systems, as well as access to external knowledge. Outlining an agenda for future research, we present a draft model of the learning process that includes 1) knowledge acquisition, 2) advocacy/ decision- making, and 3) institutionalization." (excerpt)

J. C. Lopez and B. Fisher-Yoshida, Peacebuilding in Colombia: From the Lens of Community and Policy. Routledge, 2023, 184 pp., GBP 27.99 (Paperback). ISBN: 9781032313078.