Introduction

In the last few decades, several key trends in armed conflicts have changed significantly. After several decades in which the world became more peaceful, the trend has been reversed and now conflicts have become more protracted, more violent, and recur more often. Several developments have likely contributed to these changes, including 1) geopolitical rivalry among major and regional powers in the context of a changing global order; 2) an increase in the use of violent extremism as a way to express frustration with existing local and regional ideologies and orders; 3) new threats to human security, including infectious diseases, climate change and related natural disasters, resource scarcity, and the impact of new technologies (see ACLED 2022; PRIO 2022; UCDP 2022; United Nations and World Bank 2018; United Nations 2022). Separately, and even more so when compounded, these developments can increase the risk of violent conflict.

However, in many cases the effects of these developments have also triggered peaceful cooperation (Autesserre 2021; Mac Ginty 2021). The point is that the outcome of these effects on any specific social-ecological system is not pre-determined. Despite the overall trend, the outcome in each specific context depends on the actions of those affected by these developments – both in terms of investments in mitigation, resilience, disaster preparedness, social cohesion, and so on, and in response to specific events or developments. The project that resulted in this book set out to explore if peacebuilding approaches that are adaptive to context, like Adaptive Peacebuilding, rather than pre-determined by ideological assumptions, like the liberal peace approach, are more effective at preventing and resolving conflict.

The United Nations (UN) Security Council has the ultimate responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. However, many other parts of the UN, and indeed the international system, contribute toward this goal, including the UN Peacebuilding Commission. In 2016, the UN took the lead in redefining the concept and practice of international peacebuilding by shifting the focus of the UN agenda away from crisis management toward prevention and by introducing the concept of “sustaining peace” (see Chap. 3). The sustaining peace concept shifts the primary agency from the international to the national and local levels. It leverages all functional areas of the UN (human rights, humanitarian, women, development, peacebuilding, peace operations, and political) to generate sustaining peace outcomes. It broadens the institutional responsibility for peace from the UN secretariat to the whole UN system, that is, the whole UN system contributes to one overarching goal—to sustain peace. And the sustaining peace concept broadens the instrumental focus of the UN beyond its current emphasis on the just-in-time capacity to respond rapidly to emerging violent conflicts (de Coning 2018).

However, the adoption of the new sustaining peace agenda has been slow, even within the UN. The operationalization of the new UN sustaining peace agenda is thus still a work in progress, and one of the reasons why we have put forward this edited volume is to explore if the Adaptive Peacebuilding approach can help build further momentum for the sustaining peace agenda.

Context-Specific vs. Determined-Design Peacebuilding

Although there is a broad spectrum of peacebuilding approaches in theory, one has been dominant since the end of the Cold War, liberal peacebuilding. When looking at Peace Inc.—the term that Séverine Autesserre (2021) used to describe the peace industry or those who make a living by building peace in the world—we can say that the actual practice of peacebuilding has largely remained rooted in liberal peace values and practices and that the determined-design approach to peace remains dominant, despite the shift in the academic peace literature toward hybrid, context-specific, and localization over the past decades. Although there have been exceptions, the prevailing assumption remains that international experts have the agency to analyze a conflict, determine its causes, and design interventions according to international knowledge and the best practices rooted in the liberal peace ideology.

When results are unsatisfactory, they are usually attributed to poor implementation, insufficient resources, or local spoilers. However, after several decades of implementing these liberal peace solutions, and considering the outcome of Western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the ineffectiveness of this liberal peacebuilding approach to prevent, manage, and resolve the major conflicts of the early twenty-first century is clear. This is why this project has explored an alternative approach in this edited volume. We consider the effectiveness of context-specific adaptive approaches to addressing armed conflicts and compare them with determined-design approaches in a few specific contemporary and recent cases. We have used one specific approach—Adaptive Peacebuilding—to explain the theory behind this alternative approach (see Chap. 2), and we have introduced and analyzed the UN’s new sustaining peace agenda (see Chap. 3), to show how the UN is shifting its own peacebuilding thinking toward a more context-specific adaptive approach. Toward this aim, we have gathered empirical evidence from a variety of case studies in four regions—Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America—and in the context of current geopolitical shifts, we have also explored two cases that analyze the evolving peacebuilding policies of two major East Asian countries, China and Japan. Through this empirical research, we have attempted to identify in each specific case examples of determined-design and context-specific adaptive approaches to peacebuilding, and we have analyzed the effectiveness of each of these approaches to try to determine their respective effects on sustaining peace.

We review our findings in the next section, but before we do, a brief reminder of the theory of Adaptive Peacebuilding and the sustaining peace concept is in order so we may better understand the comparative analysis between the determined-design and context-specific adaptive approaches to peacebuilding in the case study chapters.

Sustaining Peace with Adaptive Peacebuilding

The origin of the sustaining peace concept can be traced to Johan Galtung’s idea of positive peace, which highlights the attitudes, institutions, and structures that need to be present to create and sustain peaceful societies, as opposed to negative peace, which sees peace merely as the absence of violence (Galtung 1969). The 2016 twin resolutions on sustaining peace were inspired by the need to redirect the international community’s collective efforts toward positive peace to respond to today’s complex and interconnected crises. Therefore, the sustaining peace agenda attempts to go beyond managing negative peace and instead provides a roadmap for the UN and its member-states to synergize their peacebuilding efforts around multiple actions across all the stages of the conflict and peace cycles.

In this book, we have introduced Adaptive Peacebuilding as one approach to pursue the sustaining peace agenda that is specially designed to cope with the complexity of an increasingly uncertain world. Adaptive Peacebuilding can be described as an iterative process of experimentation, learning, and adaptation that is home-grown, self-emergent, and locally owned and led. This approach is aimed at increasing the likelihood of self-sustaining results as it is grounded in the local context of each conflict situation, and it depends on a participatory process that ensures that solutions emerge from within the affected communities and are sustained by their continued active engagement and ownership of the process. The core elements of the Adaptive Peacebuilding approach can be summarized in the following six principles:

  1. 1.

    The initiatives taken to influence the sustainability of a specific peace process have to be context- and time-specific, and thus emergent from a collaborative process with the people affected by the conflict.

  2. 2.

    Adaptive Peacebuilding is a goal-orientated or problem-solving approach, so it is important to analyze and identify, together with the people affected by the conflict, what the problems are and what the initiatives aimed at sustaining peace should try to achieve. At the operational level initiatives can imply actions, interventions, campaigns, and programs.

  3. 3.

    Based on this analysis and the intended objectives this process generates, multiple initiatives are simultaneously undertaken to try to nudge the system into the desired direction, and the effect of each initiative is then monitored, assessed, and adapted in a continuous and iterative purposeful learning process.

  4. 4.

    One element of the adaptive approach is variety; as the outcome is uncertain, one must experiment with a variety of initiatives across a spectrum of probabilities. The theory of change that informs each alternative needs to be clearly understood so that the effect actually generated can be assessed against the desired effect.

  5. 5.

    Another element of the adaptive approach is selection; we have to actively monitor and evaluate the effects of each initiative by paying close attention to the feedback they generate. It is important not to monitor only for desired effects, but to assess actual effects, as we know that each attempt to influence a complex system will generate a number of reactions, not all of which can be anticipated. Adaptive Peacebuilding requires an active participatory decision-making process that assesses the effects of the various initiatives in the context of an evolving social and ecological system. Those initiatives that perform poorly or generate negative side effects should be abandoned or adapted, while those that show promise can be further adapted to increase their effectiveness or introduce further variety, or can be scaled up to explore their effects on larger sub-systems.

  6. 6.

    Lastly, Adaptive Peacebuilding is an iterative process. It has to be repeated continuously because social-ecological systems are highly dynamic and will continuously evolve. Any effect achieved is temporary and subject to new dynamics, so the adaptation process has no stopping point. While key milestones can be achieved—ceasefires, peace agreements, new constitutions, peaceful elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and so on, to name a few in the political domain—and the behavior of societies can be transformed, peace will need to be continuously sustained. Even if a society is no longer at risk of lapsing into violent conflict, the institutions that sustain its peace will need to keep on adapting to changes in its own system and its environment.

In contrast, determined-design approaches are goal-oriented in the sense that they move toward a goal with a pre-determined direction. A liberal peacebuilding program may also be implemented because of a local initiative. However, in the current environment of increasing uncertainty and volatility, peacebuilding approaches that aim at a pre-determined direction and are based on previous best practices and externally driven agency – often based on liberal values – have been increasingly demonstrated to be ineffective in various regions affected by conflict. Adaptive Peacebuilding, on the other hand, is based on an alternative approach that promotes adaptiveness, resilience, and self-organization in each specific conflict-affected context. Therefore, Adaptive Peacebuilding requires a shift in peacebuilders’ mindsets from thinking in terms of fixing a society’s problems to recognizing that it is only the society itself that can fix its own problems, and at best, peacebuilders can help to facilitate and support this process. It also requires a change in the culture of organizations, partners, and funders away from linear plans that pursue pre-determined outcomes toward investments in processes that generate context-specific emergent outcomes. This requires changes in the way organizations and institutions plan, budget, manage, assess progress, report, and engage with partners and with the affected communities. Most importantly, it requires a decolonization of the ideological frameworks and institutional imperatives that inform the knowledge, attitudes, and behavior of international peacebuilders. If self-sustainable peace is the goal, what should drive and determine the scope and pace of the peace process has to be determined by the context and the people affected by the conflict.

What Have We Learned from Peacebuilding in Colombia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Syria, and Timor-Leste?

Colombia’s peace process, following the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP), generated a number of examples of adaptive and context-specific approaches to peacebuilding, especially in the context of adapting aspects of the implementation of the peace process and reintegration policies to a variety of local contexts across the country. The implementation of the Colombia peace agreement is also an example of a participatory process that engages local communities in various aspects of reintegration and other initiatives. The Colombia case study demonstrates the importance of adaptive approaches attuned to local needs and contexts.

In the case of the Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (ARN), government institutions, local populations, and international cooperation actors came together to support the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) program of the FARC-EP. Benefiting from the lessons learned from previous DDR experiences in the country and from community participation, ARN agents facilitated projects to generate income, promote social cohesion, and avoid the resurgence of violence. Another program, the Development Programme with Territorial Focus (PDET), generated a participative process involving more than 32,000 initiatives in which local communities forwarded their proposals to attain peace, justice, and an implementation roadmap. With support from international donors, the PDET contributed to sustaining the peace accords by establishing several context-specific adaptive projects. Lastly, a Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) was created to provide a transitional court system to which all the conflict victims could send their petitions, thereby facilitating a way to address justice and victimhood-related grievances in the respective communities.

The Colombian case provides an implicit comparison between determined-design and context-specific peacebuilding approaches by analyzing Colombia’s experience with previous peace efforts and comparing it with the localization and adaptiveness of the National Implementation Policy (NIP) of the 2016 peace agreement. The selected cases—ARN, PDET, and JEP—show that the adaptive approach employed in the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia was more successful in consolidating and sustaining peace than previous attempts were. In these examples, international and local peacebuilders often worked together and made use of bottom-up and adaptive approaches to carefully assess local concerns and needs in different parts of the country.

The case of Mozambique addressed the small-scale civil war resurgence in the country between 2012 and 2019, and assessed the gradual shift toward adaptive approaches, which resulted in more positive outcomes compared to earlier attempts and despite Mozambique’s complex and uncertain context. The examples of adaptiveness explored in this case study include the approaches carried out by the personal envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Mozambique (UN-PESGM) and the European Union (EU), as well as those of “localized” international non-governmental organizations (L-INGOs), namely the Community of Sant’Egidio (CSE) and the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). The interventions implemented by these peace actors encompassed projects related to various sustaining peace tools, such as peace mediation, peacebuilding, humanitarian, and development assistance. The Mozambique case study identifies a shift toward more context-specificity, national ownership, and adaptiveness in contemporary peacebuilding efforts, compared to those employed in the earlier peace processes. In the case of Mozambique, this shift began with an adaptive mediation structure focused on external process facilitation, national ownership, and the promotion of self-organization, leading to a new peace agreement in August 2019 and more adaptive and context-specific peacebuilding programs.

In addition, L-INGOs such as the CSE and the AKDN have provided valuable examples of how INGOs may implement adaptive approaches by remaining localized, relying on local staff, and staying firmly connected to local communities. Their adaptive approaches enabled them to build trust with local, national, and international stakeholders while developing in-depth knowledge about local issues and promoting the much-needed flexibility to adapt to changing needs and challenges. Overall, the gradual switch to adaptive approaches in Mozambique confirms the assumption that peace needs to emerge from within to become self-sustainable in the long term and that the design, implementation, and evaluation of peacebuilding programs should stimulate the self-organization and resilience necessary for Mozambican society to manage its own tensions.

In the case of Mozambique, while liberal peacebuilding allowed for positive outcomes after the 1992 General Peace Agreement (GPA), it did not create conditions for long-term peace. On the other hand, adaptive approaches started to emerge during the recent mediation process that took place between 2013 and 2019. Since then, domestic and external peacebuilding actors have been reevaluating their activities and shifting their approaches toward context-specific and adaptive interventions. An analysis of the implementation of the 2019 peace agreement reveals that the focus on national ownership has helped to stimulate self-organization and an adaptive mindset in the peacebuilding stage, for example, with the implementation of the DDR programs. Several major peacebuilding donors in Mozambique, including the EU, are following this trend, developing more context-specific approaches to peacebuilding activities in the country. Finally, this case study introduces L-INGOs such as the CSE and the AKDN as key examples of how to contribute to sustaining peace through adaptive approaches amidst increasing complexity and uncertainty. The approaches and methods used by CSE and AKDN reinforce the idea that process facilitation and institutional learning based on context-specific feedback enable more flexible, adaptive, and effective peacebuilding initiatives. In addition, they confirm that peacebuilding in the twenty-first century should holistically address cross-cutting issues, such as poverty, inequality, and education, to respond to the needs of those most vulnerable.

The Palestine case study assesses the adaptiveness of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), a civilian observer mission created to support the Oslo peace process, which operated between May 1994 and January 2019. The TIPH occurred in three main phases, and although the first and second were short-lived, TIPH III operated for 24 years in the city of Hebron, from January 1997 to January 2019. The mission consisted of assisting the normalization of daily life in the city of Hebron, creating a feeling of stability and security among the Palestinians affected by the conflict. However, the mission was implemented in a context of structural asymmetry observed in the conflict’s political, military, and socio-economic differences between the Israeli and Palestinian parties. This case study finds that the relative effectiveness of TIPH III was due to its ability to continuously adapt its operations according to the evolving context over the years and through its focus on engagement with local communities. The Palestinian case study highlights the role of two dimensions in the TIPH’s success: impartiality and adaptiveness. While the TIPH’s mandate stemmed from an agreement between the Israeli authorities and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), profiled as a top-down and deterministic peacebuilding arrangement, the mission nonetheless operated in line with an adaptive peacebuilding approach. The mission’s members showed their presence as much as possible and documented incidents, which resulted in Palestinian residents realizing that the TIPH’s presence would reduce their exposure to the risk of violence, incentivizing them to cooperate.

It is important to note that the TIPH was essentially tasked with promoting a feeling of security among Palestinian residents in Hebron with its presence alone and was not mandated to get involved in political or social affairs. It had to maintain neutrality and impartiality. However, the TIPH’s ability to monitor and record incidents, as well as its work with assisting donor countries with their small-scale assistance projects, allowed it to gain the trust of local communities. Adaptation was made possible by involving the local Palestinian communities in the TIPH’s activities and by undertaking initiatives together such as implementing various types of community relations projects. The TIPH also conducted campaigns to promote public awareness of legal rights and encouraged Palestinians to be actively informed about legal violations and other related incidents. Overall, the presence of the TIPH in Hebron was characterized by adaptiveness within an asymmetric context and by sustained confidence-building on the ground. The mission was able to reduce violence and contribute to the peacebuilding goals of the Oslo agreements.

The Syrian case study explored both externally driven and locally driven adaptive peacebuilding approaches in one of the most violent and complex armed conflicts of the twenty-first century. These approaches were present in the responses of the UN Special Envoys, the permanent members of the Security Council (the so-called P5), and other local actors. The role of adaptiveness in the Civil Society Support Room (CSSR) and the National Agenda for the Future of Syria (NAFS) were particularly evident in this case. On the other hand, various determined-design initiatives have been ineffective in Syria and have failed to secure a comprehensive peace agreement between the conflict parties. The reality on the ground is that despite several interventions since the beginning of the conflict, a more self-sustainable and locally driven national peace process is still absent in Syria. However, the CSSR, NAFS, and other UN-supported initiatives show that even in an ongoing and protracted conflict like Syria, adaptive approaches to peacebuilding can be effective. The initiatives promoted by the CSSR and the NAFS demonstrated the capacity for stimulating dialogue, building important networks and trust, and generating momentum for peace in the absence of a formal ceasefire or peace agreement. Promoting an agenda that underlines local and national ownership and self-organization in Syria is a long-term effort, but the positive outcomes identified in this case study show that context-oriented adaptive interventions that encourage local participation and resilient institutions can make a positive difference, even in contexts like Syria.

Some examples of positive outcomes emerge from the mediation initiatives conducted by UN Special Envoys—who secured small-scale ceasefires—and the CSSR—which provided a space for members of the Syrian civil society from various professional fields such as legal experts, academics, economists, and former government advisors to build trust and foster coordination and collaboration. One last example of adaptation presented in this case study is the NAFS Programme, which created a platform for technical dialogue regarding post-conflict state-building. The NAFS brought together Syrian technical experts, civil society actors, and scholars, who participated in a self-organized iterative process of debating and finding solutions for Syria’s post-conflict reconstruction needs.

The case of Timor-Leste addresses interventions related to DDR, security sector development, and the issue of local veterans in the post-independence period, which is central to peacebuilding efforts in the country due to the relevant influence they have in shaping Timor’s political landscape. In this context, adaptive approaches took place focusing on two types of self-organization: first, bolstered by oil and gas profits, there was a generous allocation of the state’s budget to DDR issues; and second, it was possible to observe the emergence of an iterative process of inclusion focused on local governance and traditional conflict resolution mechanisms through the suco local village administration system. The suco function as a catalyst of state affairs and traditional practices, where local security is managed more effectively. Regarding the self-organization processes related to the veterans’ issue, these have consisted of an effective registration of the veterans, effective coordination with suco leaders, de-escalating tensions, and building a relationship between communities and police officers by creating Community Policing Councils (CPC), which rested on the collaboration of local communities. This highlights the significance of communal ties, culture, and customary practices.

Through these adaptive processes, national and local Timor-Leste actors positively managed the emerging tensions related to veterans’ issues, and this has been crucial in keeping the country’s stability. The public consultations and the balancing act between the state and society in attending to the veteran’s demands also prompted the emergence of context-specific and adaptive approaches. This was done through iterative and multi-faceted interactions between elites, veterans, and citizens. Thus, the Timor-Leste case study highlights the importance of a proper balance between domestic initiatives and international support while demonstrating the advantages of adaptive peacebuilding in pursuing self-sustaining peace.

What Have We Learned from the Examples of Two Non-Western Peacebuilding Approaches: The Case of China and Japan?

Considering China’s peacebuilding activities in South Sudan since the 2010s, the case study found three main features of its peace intervention. The first is that Chinese peacebuilding adapted in a more intensive manner toward the end of the decade than at the beginning. However, this process occurred from the top-down, because of policy developments in Beijing, rather than from in situ learning and experimentation in South Sudan. Secondly, while the Chinese approach to peacebuilding became more adaptive, it did not engage with the South Sudanese population directly but remained focused on engagement with the government and the political leadership of the country. Thirdly, China’s interventions yielded mixed results in South Sudan. On the one hand, the outcome was positive because China contributed to the adoption of a peace agreement and the creation of a government of national unity between the state and rebel groups. However, on the other hand, it did not achieve tangible gains for the local population.

The case study of China’s peacebuilding approach in South Sudan analyzed the contribution of China’s diplomatic and development activities to the peacebuilding process. Among others it considered the relationship between Chinese actors and the government of South Sudan, South Sudanese civil society organizations (CSOs), the UN, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional organization that worked on peace mediation in South Sudan. This case highlights that the Chinese intervention was not the product of a formally designated “peacebuilding” policy. While China is engaged in peacebuilding activities globally, its peacebuilding concept is not defined, resulting in activities conceptualized in an ad hoc way for each conflict-affected situation. In the case of South Sudan, China contributed military and police officers and a military unit to the UN peacekeeping force, engaged with CSOs for humanitarian aid delivery, and engaged with rebel groups and the government in the context of peace mediation. China’s top-down adaptive and context-specific approach was effective in contributing to the adoption of a peace agreement in South Sudan, helping to consolidate and sustain the peace agreement, and contributing to development and humanitarian aid. However, China’s shift to a more context-specific and adaptive approach did not extend to direct initiatives with the South Sudanese society but remained limited to government-to-government relations.

The case study of Japan’s peacebuilding activities focused on its role in the the Philippines’ Mindanao peace process, where a secessionist movement has been active for several decades. This case examined how Japan made adaptations in its peacebuilding activities in Mindanao across four periods. From 1990 to 2002, Japan assisted Mindanao through loans to the national government for infrastructure and technological development. This began after a peace agreement between the government of the Philippines (GOP) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in 1996. The second stage consisted of full-fledged support under the Koizumi Initiative (2002–2006) and included supporting World Bank loans, the dispatching of JICA advisory officials to the region, and a closer assessment of the political, social, and economic needs of Mindanao. This period also coincided with institutional reforms within JICA and Japan’s ODA, allowing the expansion of assistance to Mindanao. The third stage lasted between 2006 and 2011 and was characterized by the direct engagement of JICA’s head, Sadako Ogata, and top-level officials of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the government of the Philippines (GOP). This bolstered the involvement of the Japanese government and allowed for peacebuilding programs to be tailored to local needs despite the recurrence of conflict in the second half of the decade and the subsequent stagnation of the peace process. The last stage (2011–2019) consisted of the revival of Japanese peacebuilding for Mindanao. After promoting a peace meeting in August 2011, in collaboration with Malaysia, Japan began diversifying its assistance concerning counterpart agencies, beneficiaries, areas of intervention, and contents. The Comprehensive Capacity Development Project for the Bangsamoro was launched with local actors, covering institution-building and social-economic development.

Despite Japan’s unique constitutional constraints, the Japanese government played a vital peacebuilding role in Mindanao. It operated adaptively by incrementally changing its legislation to allow greater flexibility in its peacebuilding role. Japan’s assistance was based on socio-economic, diplomatic, and historical ties with the Philippines, and was initiated in the early 2000s. The Japanese assistance subsequently diversified its range, counterpart agencies, and target beneficiaries. Technical cooperation emphasizing capacity development was another critical aspect of adaptiveness, especially since dispatched experts had internalized aid norms according to the principles of self-reliance and ownership. Japan was also able to play an intermediary and mediating role in the context of the Mindanao armed conflict by connecting with diverse stakeholders through process facilitation. Altogether, Japan’s peacebuilding in Mindanao can be considered context-specific and adaptive and is a valuable example of the positive outcomes that adaptive and context-specific approaches to peacebuilding can yield.

Finally, in looking at the peacebuilding actions undertaken by two non-Western peacebuilding actors, namely China and Japan, it was possible to identify a pattern of transformation in their peacebuilding practices from a predominantly determined-design approach in their early engagements in South Sudan and the Philippines respectively, more toward context-specific and adaptive approaches in the later years.

Overall Findings

All the case study chapters found that overall, top-down, determined-design, and technocratic approaches were less effective than context-specific, locally driven, and adaptive approaches to managing and resolving conflicts and sustaining peace. The context-specific approaches that were most effective were those that were rooted in the history, culture, and current experienced reality of the people affected by conflict. The adaptive approaches identified in the case studies were more effective when they relied on the active engagement and participation of the affected community. When people affected by conflict felt that they have been involved in shaping the peace, they also felt a sense of responsibility to sustain the institutions and processes necessary to sustain peace. One emerging finding from the case studies thus seems to be that there is a link between the extent to which a peace initiative is context-specific and adaptive and the level of its self-sustainability.

This implies that when it comes to assessing peace initiatives, some of the indicators of the sustainability of a peace initiative may be the extent to which they are context-specific and adaptive. It would be important, however, to look beyond formal institutions established as part of the implementation of peace agreements. Broader legitimacy and ownership would imply that societies and communities spontaneously integrate the spirit and letter of such agreements into their own cultural and social institutions, for example, through song, dance, and spiritual affirmation and re-enforcement (Everyday Peace Indicators 2022; Firchow 2018). As reflected in the peace literature, the legitimacy of peace processes depends, in part, on the quality and resilience of the circuitry between the formal peace process and its manifestations and lived experience at the community level (Mac Ginty 2019). Several of the case studies demonstrate that it is possible to assess the legitimacy and quality of the peace process by identifying, tracing, and evaluating the degree to which it has been integrated into local social institutions as an indicator of the extent to which a community or society are investing in sustaining this peace (Mac Ginty 2021). One of the characteristics of societies that are able to sustain their peace, despite pressures, shocks, and setbacks, is that they have invested in social institutions that proactively work to promote tolerance and respect across identity groups (Aumeerally et al. 2021). One such example has been the National Peace Accord that emerged from a combined private-civic-and public sector initiative to safeguard the South African peace process (Carmichael 2022). As the case studies in this volume show, there have been several subsequent attempts to establish similar infrastructures for peace initiatives elsewhere (Odendaal 2013).

As these case studies have demonstrated, however, it is impossible either to pre-determine what kind of societal arrangements will generate self-sustainable peace in a specific context or to pre-plan a series of peacebuilding steps that can lead to such a peace. As discussed in Chap. 2, this uncertainty is generated by the non-linear dynamics of complex social systems. The irreproducibility of peacebuilding lessons from one case to another is thus not a result of insufficient knowledge or inadequate planning or implementation, but part of the characteristics of complexity. This explains why all the case studies in this volume found that context-specific and adaptive approaches were better suited to cope with the uncertainty, unpredictability, and irreproducibility that characterized the peacebuilding experiences in each of the specific contexts studied.

In Chap. 2, complexity theory provides a theoretical framework for understanding how the resilience and adaptive capacity of social systems can be influenced to help them prevent, contain, and recover from violent conflict and sustain peace. Insights derived from how self-organizing processes maintain and transform complex systems suggest that for peace to become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions that promote and sustain peace need to emerge from within the culture, history, and socio-ecological contexts of the relevant society. A society is peaceful when its institutions can ensure that political and economic competition is managed without people resorting to violence to pursue their interests. For peace to be self-sustainable, a society thus needs to have sufficiently robust social institutions to identify, channel, and manage its disputes peacefully. In addition, these same social institutions need to be resilient enough to help the society absorb and adapt to shocks in the broader socio-ecological system it is part of, such as natural disasters, climate change, or political and economic developments elsewhere in the system that may have an adverse effect on the supply chains or other resources and systems it relies on.

Peacebuilders can assist this process, but if they interfere too much, they can cause harm by disrupting the feedback, critical for self-organization to emerge and be sustained. Too much external interference undermines self-organization. Every time an external intervention solves a problem, it interrupts the feedback needed to stimulate societal self-organization. For example, the more effective an international operation is in stabilizing a situation, the less incentive there is for political elites to invest in the internal political settlements necessary to bring about self-sustainable peace. State, civic, and social institutions develop resilience through trial and error over generations. Too much filtering and cushioning slows down and inhibits these processes. Understanding this tension—and the constraints it poses on international agency—helps us realize why peacebuilding interventions in various regions have made the mistake of interfering so much that they ended up undermining the ability of societies to self-organize. In this context, the findings presented in this edited volume that may be useful to peacebuilding practitioners include the following:

  1. 1.

    To help end violent conflict and to support national and local efforts to build peace, the international community should stimulate, support, and facilitate dialogue processes among the affected communities and parties, so that peace emerges from within, rather than influencing them to pursue outcomes pre-determined by the international community.

  2. 2.

    Protecting lives is essential in protracted and recurrent conflicts. However, protection is not sufficient on its own to safeguard and sustain people’s livelihoods and dignity. Regardless of whether there is a peace agreement in place, implementing peacebuilding and reconstruction programs in relatively stable areas can be a significant contribution to preventing the humanitarian situation from deteriorating.

  3. 3.

    One of the characteristics of complex armed conflicts is that the context and interests of the affected communities and parties to the conflicts may differ from region to region. As a result, it is necessary to develop context-specific solutions, that is, contextualized peace agreements, peacebuilding, and reconstruction programs in different regions.

  4. 4.

    It is essential to involve not only the parties to the conflict but also the affected people and communities whose understanding of local needs and context should inform the peace process, as well as recovery and reconstruction programs.

  5. 5.

    Using existing local structures, such as social and administrative systems, is a fundamental tool to sustain peace.

  6. 6.

    It is important to understand that peacebuilding may be needed for decades, even in the absence of violent conflict, to prevent a relapse, build resilience, and sustain peace.

An Adaptive Peacebuilding approach does not imply that expert or scientific knowledge is not important, but one needs to understand the distinction between evidence-based knowledge and how to act on it in a specific social context. For example, science may indicate that one prevents the spread of COVID-19 by avoiding close contact between people, but how to achieve that in a densely populated slum community is something we can only find out through adaptive practice and learning in partnership and collaboration with local communities.

One of the core lessons from the debates in the peace literature is that the empowered agency of the local people involved is critical for the emergence and sustainability of any peace initiative. Adaptive Peacebuilding shares with other context-specific approaches—the hybrid peace tradition and the local turn in peacebuilding—a recognition of the limits of top-down determined-design peacebuilding interventions. Adaptive Peacebuilding can contribute to the local and hybrid turns in the scholarship by providing a theoretical framework grounded in complexity theory that explains why local ownership a necessary but not sufficient condition for self-sustainable peace is. Thus, Adaptive Peacebuilding introduces and explains the role of self-organization in ordering complex social systems.

Adaptive Peacebuilding is thus a conscious effort to decolonize peacebuilding by placing the affected communities in the driving seat of an iterative doing-while-learning process aimed at navigating the complexity inherent in trying to nudge social-ecological change processes toward sustaining peace without causing harm.

Conclusions

This edited volume has attempted to engage with the current debates in the peace literature and the actual reality of peacebuilding practices on the ground. The primary distinction in the volume, as exemplified in the four questions that all the case studies have grappled with, is between, on the one hand, determined-design or top-down approaches to peacebuilding that are based on pre-existing theories, models, or best practices, for example, the liberal peace approach, and on the other hand, context-specific, locally driven, and adaptive approaches to peacebuilding that are bottom-up in that they are emergent from, and continuously adapting to, the local cultural, historical, and political context. The case studies in this edited volume have found a large and diverse number of empirical examples where in specific instances, context-specific adaptive approaches have been more effective to sustain peace than determined-design peacebuilding approaches.

The various cases studied, from Colombia to the Philippines, show that context-specific adaptive peacebuilding approaches help to sustain peace because they stimulate, facilitate, and support local agency, resilience, and self-organization. Within this context we have introduced Adaptive Peacebuilding as one particular approach and method to sustain peace in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. Complexity science provides us with a theoretical framework for understanding how complex social systems lapse into violent conflict and how they can prevent or recover from conflict. This means that for a peace process to become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions need to emerge from within, from the culture, history, and socio-economic context of the relevant society. Adaptive Peacebuilding contributes to the “local turn” scholarship by providing a theoretical framework grounded in complexity theory—the role of self-organization in the ordering of social systems—that explains why the meaningful participation of the affected communities is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for self-sustainable peace.

The case studies in this volume have also reminded us that international actors can assist and facilitate peacebuilding processes, but if they interfere too much, they will undermine the self-organizing processes necessary to sustain resilient social institutions. Adaptive Peacebuilding navigates this dilemma with an adaptive methodology where peacebuilders, together with the communities and people affected by the conflict, actively engage in a structured process to sustain peace and resolve conflicts by employing an iterative learning process and adaptation.