Whose Peace Are We Building?

How Can the UN Sustaining Peace Agenda Live Up to Its Potential?

“…The main point that is conveyed through this case study is that Tunisia, from a complexity-informed approach to peace, has enough self-organizing assets and agency to "fix" its own problems (Ghani and Lockhart 2009). To avoid falling into the hierarchy of knowledge traps mentioned above, international actors should draw on the strength of their ignorance (Mahmoud 2021), which gives them the permission to ask probing questions and allows answers to emerge from the inside out, from those closest to the problem. They should also resist engineering specific outcomes (de Coning 2016) that would produce, to quote de Coning again, "the opposite effect of that which sustaining peace aims to achieve."…”

“…The above integral conceptual reframing of sustaining peace, while appearing as a matter of common sense, is hard to promote within the UN without the exercise of system thinking and great deal of humility and presence, let alone resources. As experience in Burundi attests (Mahmoud and Mbiatem 2021), it is a challenging undertaking both at the individual and collective levels. This is largely due to the long-standing systemic barriers (Alliance for Peacebuilding 2017) that prevent the UN country team from seeing the larger system and forcing it to concentrate only on the parts that are most visible (Reed 2006) from their own vantage point.…”

“…In addition to upending our sense of what is normal, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and its variants have amplified these global imbalances and challenged the reach and relevance of existing institutions and their hierarchical structures (Samur 2019). It has ushered in a paradigm shift in the way we conceive and enact leadership (Mahmoud 2021), particularly in times of crisis. The reader might then wonder what this cursory description of a world that seems to be unmoored has to do with building and sustaining peace.…”

“…Decoupling the sustaining of peace from peacebuilding would attenuate the conceptual muddle its binary relationship with conflict has created within and outside the UN. Such a separation would open the doors to innovative, empirically based approaches that broaden our understanding of peace, how it should be built, sustained and by whom (Mahmoud and Mbiatem 2021). This chapter examines some of these approaches with a particular focus on the emerging paradigm of adaptive peacebuilding (de Coning 2018).…”