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This article discusses the efficacy of community-based peacebuilding efforts to develop sustainable peace in conflict-torn communities. Using participatory action research (PAR) is a powerful means of developing sustainable solutions to a conflict: It provides the means to test peace theories and draw upon a community's knowledge and strengths in order to develop interventions. The knowledge gained can be lost if not understood within national or regional contexts, particularly if there is divergence between interests that can destroy community-based peacebuilding accomplishments. Holistic approaches facilitate sustainable peace and foster learning applicable to other situations. Two case studies, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, identified broad principles that potentially can be applied in the development of policies and practices. In the Nigerian case, two communities had experienced years of conflict. The PAR component was based on participatory dialogue. In the Zimbabwe case, political conflict was resolved through the development of a mutually beneficial peace garden.

AbstractRefugees have been largely overlooked in analyses of Myanmar's transition, apparently considered peripheral to more prominent topics such as negotiation with armed groups, economic reform, and political elections. By analysing approaches to return and repatriation in three distinct contexts—refugees in camps in Thailand, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and Chin refugees in Malaysia and India—this article shows that proposals for the return and repatriation of refugees are a form of 'border governance' (that is, governance in, of, and through borders). This operates at three scales: (1) global border control by keeping refugees in their region of origin or returning them to their country of origin, (2) national border control by reinforcing boundaries between Myanmar and its surrounding states, and (3) the governance of political transition by reinforcing the Myanmar government's narrative of peacebuilding by recasting continuing conflict as conditions suitable for refugee return. Premature promotion of repatriation has a number of harmful outcomes for refugee communities: encouraging the withdrawal of international aid, escalating fear and uncertainty, and political bolstering of a Bamar-dominated government and military vis-a-vis ethnic minority groups. This analysis supports a broader understanding of repatriation and its consequences, recognising that the promotion of refugee return can have significant political implications that are apparent even before mass returns have been carried out and which may reverberate far into the future.

The persistence of intergroup conflicts around the world creates urgency for research on child development in such settings. Complementing the existing knowledge about internalizing and externalizing developmental outcomes, this article shifts the focus to children's prosocial behaviors, and more specifically, introduces the Developmental Peacebuilding Model (DPM). The DPM makes three main contributions. First, the DPM integrates a developmental intergroup framework and socio-ecological perspective, with a peacebuilding paradigm, to examine the target and type of children's prosocial behavior in settings of intergroup conflict. Second, DPM outlines how children's outgroup prosocial behaviors, which promote constructive change at different levels of the social ecology, can be understood as peacebuilding and fostering social cohesion. Third, the article concludes with the DPM's implications for research and global policy. ; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development ; Office of First Minister & Deputy First Minister, Government of Northern Ireland ; Spencer Foundation ; Richard Benjamin Trust and the British Academy (BA)/Leverhulme ; United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Global Impact Acceleration Awards (GIAA) ; Department for the Economy (DFE) GCRF ; British Psychological Society (BPS) Social Psychology Section ; Society for Research on Child Development Small Grant for Early Career Scholars

The development of land rights programmes is deeply rooted in power relations. Using discourse analysis, this paper unpacks how Western logics (assumptions and conventions) regarding 'best practices' for property rights institutions and tenure security impact the design of peacebuilding programmes. In 2017 the Government of Timor-Leste passed a controversial Land Law Package. These laws were initially developed for a USAID land reform programme. But local dynamics, actions, and interests were ignored. Examining civil society exclusion from decision-making infers a reluctance to acknowledge local voices and practices that threaten liberal peacebuilding interests. This paper is organized into two parts. In the first we argue that peacebuilding 'best practices' reflect how dominant Western discourses create conceptual boundaries ('violent hierarchies') to restrict the recognition of indigenous ideas as legitimate. In the second we examine Timorese civil society efforts to improve the land reform programme through acts of resistance to bodies of authority. Overall, we illuminate how in Timor-Leste Western assumptions and conventions contributed to boundaries to local participation, which contradicts liberal narratives of empowerment and capacity-building.

Young people need to be recognized and supported to play a major role as agents of peace. The society needs to partner with them to form a sine qua non (an essential condition) in promoting the global agenda for youth involvement in sustainable peace. Peacebuilding is broadly defined as an 'action to identify and support structures which tends to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.' Therefore, peacebuilding is directed towards the eradication of the root causes of violence and is necessarily a multifaceted and multidimensional project that involves political, legal, economic, social, religious and cultural institutions and security practices, which are understood as complementary and mutually reinforcing. This paper examines how the involvement of youths in the peacebuilding process can promote sustainable peace in Maiduguri, Borno State, as a result of the Boko Haram conflict to avoid future occurrences of such conflict. The objective of the study is to explore the role Maiduguri youths can play in building sustainable and long-term peace in Maiduguri, Borno State as a critical stakeholder. The study employs the multidimensional research method also as a peer-review paper, the secondary source of data was used. The finding reveals that youth are critical stakeholders in peacebuilding and should be involved at all stages of the peace process. The study recommends that the Borno State Government should formulate policies and programs that are directed towards youth's engagement in governance, address unemployment problem etc. since participatory democracy, youth empowerment, and social wellbeing are critical drivers of sustainable development, peace and security.

This article investigates local perceptions of international peacebuilding in Sierra Leone and Liberia and explains the need for an inclusive framework addressing peace and justice at the same time. These neighbouring countries in West Africa not only share the burden of an intertwined conflict history but have also been described as prototypes for successful peacebuilding. However, both cases show striking differences with regard to the relative importance given to security and justice during the peace process and within the selected peacebuilding approaches. In Liberia, the peacebuilding framework was clearly sequenced, favouring security over justice. In Sierra Leone, it included a comprehensive TJ component, which was implemented alongside security-centred initiatives. In order to compare these two cases and to elaborate on the challenges of establishing both peace and justice in post-conflict settings with a more people-centred focus, we conducted expert interviews with (inter)national peacebuilding actors and opinion surveys, asking how the civilian populations themselves perceive the peace process and the effectiveness of international peacebuilding. The findings provide insights into local experiences with the inclusive peacebuilding framework implemented in Sierra Leone and the drawbacks of delaying justice and accountability in Liberia.

Complexity theory and systems thinking are increasingly popular in both academic and practitioner discourses to "improve" peacebuilding. Recently, they have also been considered to make peacebuilding interventions more bottom-up and less exclusive. Contributing to the debate in international political sociology on the role of (professional) knowledge in shaping interventions, I examine this claim with an analysis of professional peacebuilding discourse. Drawing on an extensive corpus of operational guidance, policy documents, and interview material, I situate the emerging uses of concepts of complexity in peacebuilding against the backdrop of the power struggles of its actors and institutions. Against the introduction of measures of managerial control, professional peacebuilding discourse has cast its interventions as exceptional and in need of different methods. Thus, learning replaces donors' standardized measures of accountability. However, the peculiar conflation of accountability as learning that emerges from these struggles legitimizes self-referential expert rule and learning, and marginalizes debates on peacebuilders' accountability. Rather than "de-colonizing" or making peacebuilding more inclusive, the way complexity concepts have emerged in peacebuilding discourse reproduces—rather than questions—the power structures of international interventions, and denies the people targeted by interventions the status of subjects to be accountable to.

South Africa has often been lauded as an influential and pivotal actor inpeace and security affairs on the evolving African peace and security architecture. The centrality of Africa in South Africa's foreign policy has driven its exercise of peace diplomacy in a significant number of conflicts in Africa; where its mode of engagement has ranged from mediation to peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction and development assistance. Concomitant to its peace actor profile, South Africa's repertoire as an emerging development partner also forms a large part of its African agenda. The embedding of sustainable peace as a goal in the post2015 development agenda and the enduring relevance of the securitydevelopment nexus continue to exert profound influence on the parameters and conduct of South Africa's foreign policy and its pointedly Afro-centric agenda. This article argues for greater integration and harmonisation between South Africa's peace diplomacy and its development partnership agenda through the formulation of a peacebuilding and stabilisation strategy.

AbstractNational and international cooperation and development projects (CDP) are fundamental for peacebuilding. However, unforeseen global crises, like COVID-19, can endanger such projects, requiring rapid adaption. In Colombia, the coronavirus outbreak threatens to slow the implementation of peace-related projects, while simultaneously violence over control and ownership of land increases. Although the mid- to long-term consequences for peacebuilding are unknown, exploring risk-adapted strategies of national and international CDP can help identify crucial aspects for future processes and implementations. This study explores the key challenges and coping strategies of implementing agencies and stakeholders to COVID-19, thus helping to derive and improve risk-adapted strategies. After reviewing academic and grey literature, and implementing a semi-structured survey, peacebuilding risked-adapted strategies to COVID-19 are explored with respect to conflict-affected and vulnerable areas of Colombia. Findings show that increasing complexity rooted in top down governmental measures, the rise of new local power relations (e.g. armed groups, illicit activities), and social alienation are negatively affecting peacebuilding in Colombia. Future CDP risk adapted strategies should build on local interests and needs through public-private and environmental cooperation.