The post-Cold War period has been one of the most peaceful and prosperous eras in human history. However, a number of developments disrupted this relative calm in the early twenty-first century, including the effects of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, major shifts in the geopolitical power balance, significant advances in information technology, and the negative side-effects of globalization (de Coning 2022). All these trends and developments, separately and even more so when compounded, have increased the risk of violent conflict and have made preventing and resolving it more complex.

Since 2010, there has been a relevant increase in the number of violent conflict incidents and conflict-related deaths, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons, and the number of natural disasters and complex human-made emergencies (ACLED 2022; PRIO 2022; UCDP 2022). Current trends also demonstrate that violent armed conflicts are changing in nature: they have become protracted, more complex, and recur more often (United Nations and World Bank 2018; Strand and Hegre 2021). In this context, international peacebuilding actors, such as multilateral organizations like the United Nations, bilateral donor agencies like the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and national and local actors, have been seeking for new and more effective ways to prevent, manage, and resolve contemporary violent armed conflicts.

Driven by the need to reverse these alarming trends amid increasing uncertainty, risks, and complexity, scholars and practitioners have revisited the concepts, theories, and applications of international conflict resolution, and this has resulted in an emergence of a number of new approaches to peacebuilding that are transforming how we understand and practice peace in the twenty-first century. This edited volume introduces and assesses a new approach to peacebuilding initiated by the United Nations in 2016, namely sustaining peace, and one new method to pursue it, namely adaptive peacebuilding.

The Emergence of the Sustaining Peace Agenda

Since its inception, the United Nations has been a key actor in peacebuilding and conflict resolution, and the UN Charter continues to embody the principles and mechanisms for collectively achieving peace. However, the UN’s capacity to respond to and prevent crises has frequently been limited by systemic constraints. In particular, the capacity to act has been strongly conditioned by the interests of the member-states with a permanent seat in the security council. During the Cold War, its focus was to respond to armed conflicts related to the waves of decolonization and to interstate conflicts that were outside the orbit of Cold War dynamics. It was only during the post-Cold War period that the concept of peacebuilding gained prominence, after its inclusion in the 1992 UN Agenda for Peace by the then Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, which presented a sectorial approach based on four types of interventions: “preventive diplomacy,” “peacemaking,” “peacekeeping,” and “post-conflict peacebuilding.”

After several attempts to reform the UN system starting with the 2000 Brahimi Report, the establishment of the 2005 peacebuilding architecture, and the development of the 2008 Capstone Doctrine, the Report of the Advisory Group of Experts (AGE) introduced the concept of sustaining peace in June 2015, leading to concrete actions to review and strengthen the UN’s approach to peacebuilding. However, it was only with the 2016 resolutions on sustaining peace, adopted by the Security Council (S/RES/2282) and General Assembly (A/RES/70/262), that the UN sealed its intention to redirect the collective efforts of the international community to respond to today’s complex crises, moving away from linear understandings and sectoral-based responses to armed conflicts. The resolutions define sustaining peace as “both a goal and a process to build a common vision of a society, ensuring that the needs of all segments of the population are taken into account” (UNSC 2016, 2). Thus, the “sustaining peace” concept emerges as an umbrella policy framework that encompasses all activities aimed at “preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation, and recurrence of conflict” (UNSC 2016, 2)—that is, incorporating in a “whole-of-system” approach the elements of humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, peace mediation, peacebuilding, and development assistance.

The original concept of sustaining peace can also be traced back to Johan Galtung’s positive peace. In contrast to negative peace, which is simply the absence of violence, positive peace emerges from the attitudes, institutions, and structures that generate and sustain peaceful communities (Galtung 1969). Accordingly, the sustaining peace agenda seeks to move beyond sectorial conflict resolution mechanisms and provides a clear roadmap for the UN and its member-states to synchronize their efforts toward a culture of prevention. The new narrative that the sustaining concept promotes also emphasizes the implementation of peacebuilding at all phases of the conflict cycle, emphasizing the importance of supplementary actions in situations where peace threats are high and where risk factors may lead to violence. Enhanced coordination and coherence across humanitarian, development, and peace actions provide an opportunity for risk mitigation and the promotion of more successful and long-term outcomes in international peacebuilding (UNESCO 2018). For example, peacekeeping operations under the sustaining peace agenda will contribute to peace efforts by serving as a security umbrella for other partners undertaking peacebuilding actions. Early peacebuilding activities will be carried out by peacekeepers, generating momentum and laying the foundation for broader peacebuilding and development activities to be effectively implemented at a later stage (Guterres 2018; UN 2022). As peace interventions based on negative definitions of peace are geared only toward neutralizing conflict, positive peace orientations are inherently guided by maintaining and fostering peace even after violence ceases to occur. Accordingly, the concept of sustaining peace encourages peace practitioners to learn what works best on the ground and to establish the type of leadership that can promote and facilitate inclusive processes that holistically sustain peace (Mahmoud 2019). Admittedly, such multidisciplinary ethos also suggest the utility of a complexity-oriented understanding of conflict where peace tends to remain elusive despite recurring interventions (see Coleman et al. 2021).

In summary, the sustaining peace concept unfolds across four dimensions: (1) it shifts the primary agency from the international to the national and local levels; (2) it leverages all functional areas of the UN (human rights, humanitarian, women, development, peacebuilding, peace operations, and political) to generate sustaining peace outcomes; (3) 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 (4) it broadens the instrumental focus of the UN beyond its current emphasis on a just-in-time capacity to respond rapidly to emerging violent conflict (de Coning 2018b). However, despite the innovations presented by the sustaining peace concept, the reality and practice of peacebuilding today encompass a wide range of different approaches and understandings. The operationalization of the UN sustaining peace agenda remains largely untried, and the full variety of peacebuilding interactions between international, national, and local actors in complex conflict-affected situations remain unrevealed and require further research, and these are some of the reasons why we have written this edited volume.

Sustaining peace and peacebuilding are evolving concepts in continuous transformation and depend on the interpretation of both external and domestic stakeholders. The adoption and operationalization of the new sustaining peace agenda has been slow, even within the UN, and peacebuilding practices today are still largely dominated by determined-designed approaches focused on exporting liberal peace solutions that have been proven to be ineffective in non-Western societies. On the one hand, as the world order shifts away from a unipolar order centered in the Atlantic to a multipolar order, where one of the poles is the Asia-Pacific region, it has become more relevant to analyze how non-Western countries will reshape the practices and understandings of peacebuilding and which new approaches to peace these major countries will bring to the future of global governance. On the other hand, it is important to gather more empirical evidence on the ineffectiveness of determined-designed approaches and the effectiveness of context-specific approaches—in particular, adaptive peacebuilding—which by its very nature has the potential to realize sustaining peace amid increasing complexity and uncertainty.

The Shift Toward Context-Specific Peacebuilding Approaches

The core question we explore in this book is whether context-specific and adaptive approaches are more effective than determined-designed approaches to sustain peace in complex, protracted, and recurrent conflicts. Determined-designed approaches are synonymous with linear models of peacebuilding in which foreign experts analyze armed conflicts to diagnose their root causes and address them through prescriptive programmatic interventions undertaken by several international actors. This is the style of liberal peacebuilding and its top-down interventionism. Whether influenced by liberal norms or other political values, determined-designed and prescriptive peacebuilding interventions are guided by a theory of change that assumes a linear causal relationship between intervention and its intended peacebuilding outcomes. During the latter half of the twentieth century, peacebuilding discourses in academia and practice have been dominated by determined-designed and top-down approaches to conflict resolution, in which “liberal peacebuilding” has become the Western-influenced dominant paradigm.

This approach to peacebuilding has been criticized for attempting to universally apply “liberal peace theory”—which emerged from the Western history of state formation—without adequately taking other contexts into account, and for implementing this approach in a top-down expert-driven fashion. Too linear in its planning assumptions, it has failed to sufficiently involve national and local stakeholders, including former belligerents. Various alternative context-specific approaches have been explored as part of the critical peacebuilding literature. However, despite the weaknesses exposed and new insights introduced by the “local turn” debates, peacebuilding practice has been slow to adapt, and a number of major conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have exposed the ineffectiveness of the liberal peacebuilding model to prevent, manage, and resolve the major conflicts of the early twenty-first century. While liberal peacebuilding is only one example of a deterministic approach to peacebuilding, it deserves special attention in this edited volume as it has been the most influential in shaping how most multilateral and bilateral agencies have practiced peacebuilding over the past few decades.

The basic assumption behind liberal peacebuilding is that liberal democratic institutions and global market-oriented policies can effectively contribute to sustainable peace. Therefore, liberal peacebuilding has as its fundamental goal building a liberal democratic state after a conflict has ceased (Newman et al. 2009). As Roland Paris (1997, 56) underlined, liberal peacebuilding is therefore an experiment that involves transplanting Western models of social, political, and economic organization to non-Western regions to achieve “peace.” In the post-Cold War period, liberal peacebuilding has been the compass guiding Western governments’ peacebuilding interventions in non-Western regions. The assumption was that liberalism is universally attractive, and it offers a linear path to peace and development (Doyle 1983, 2005). However, promoting neoliberal economic agendas has often worsened social or economic tensions or even obstructed the reintegration of displaced populations and former combatants.

At other times, enforcing a top-down implementation of liberal democracy—instead of letting it emerge from within—may promote further political instability and sectarian divisions in certain conflict-affected societies (Newman et al. 2009, 12). Despite the admirable values promoted by liberal peacebuilders, the reality on the ground is that rather than creating liberal and democratic societies, liberal peacebuilding has led, time and again, to a situation where political and social institutions that are only superficially democratic, accountable, and effective end up being perceived as illegitimate and constraining by the local communities experiencing them. Both international and domestic actors often develop policies that may project the appearance of change but leave out all considerations related to the context, that is, preexisting political, economic, and social conditions. Rather than establishing liberal peace, determined-designed interventions have often created a context where liberal, illiberal, democratic, and undemocratic elements coexist. In this context, the absence of a full-scale war resembles a temporary truce rather than a substantive version of peace (Belloni 2012, 21).

Alternatively, context-specific approaches are synonymous with nonlinear models of peacebuilding that underline the importance of local agency for a peace process to become sustainable. These approaches are guided by the theory of complexity, which refers to the self-organization capabilities of systems affected by conflict, demonstrating that peace needs to emerge from within and consider local agents, local cultures, and local socioeconomic contexts first. In this line of thought, John Paul Lederach (1997) introduced bottom-up peacebuilding, an approach focused on cultural and societal factors as vectors of sustainable peace, highlighting the importance of local contexts and local needs in peacebuilding. Lederach’s (2003) model was based on the view that in people resides the potential for peace, and it placed a great deal of attention on indigenous resources. The local turn in peacebuilding represented a substantial shift from state-centric to multi-track approaches to peacebuilding, as demonstrated by Lederach’s pyramidal conceptual model. The logic behind bottom-up peacebuilding is that peace should reflect the interests, identities, and needs of all actors affected by conflict, particularly those that are not at the top of the pyramid, that is, the middle, and the grassroots (Lederach 1997; Paffenholz 2014). Ramsbotham et al.(2005) further developed Lederach’s pyramid model by identifying track-one actors—the UN, international and regional organizations, governments, and international financial institutions; middle-level or track-two actors—international NGOs, religious institutions and leaders, academics, and private businesses; and track-three actors—indigenous resources and local actors. In this pyramidal context, the importance of addressing armed conflicts through vertical and horizontal relationships is likely to result in more effective peacebuilding programs.

Following the local turn in peacebuilding, the next debate advanced the concept of hybrid peace, describing the coexistence and interplay between international and local actors in peacebuilding contexts (Mac Ginty 2010; Richmond and Mitchell 2011). Hybrid peacebuilding involves both determined-designed and context-specific practices, with external and domestic norms and actors existing alongside each other and interacting (Belloni 2012). Hybridity is understood as the composite forms of practice, norms, and thinking that emerged from the interaction between different groups, worldviews, and activities (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012). Hybridity also reflects the interaction between top-down and bottom-up forces and considers the levels and dynamics between top and bottom. These dynamics stretch from international elites to national elites, and to the local communities and individuals. Hybridity is embedded in the structures and institutions that shape how society is organized and can be found in everyday life (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 4).

Mac Ginty (2010) proposed a model of hybridization based on four pillars: (1) the ability of international actors to impose their version of peace and development on local actors; (2) the ability of international actors to incentivize their version of peace and development among local actors; (3) the ability of local actors to resist, delay, negotiate, subvert, and modify peacebuilding interventions; and (4) the ability of local actors to construct and maintain alternative versions of peace and development. Millar (2014) further suggested a disaggregated hybrid theory divided in four levels—institutional, practical, ritual, and conceptual—each level open to different degrees of determinism and different levels of local resistance, adding the notion of pragmatism to hybrid endeavors. The concept of hybridity is useful for peacebuilding analysis as it focuses on the interplay between actors, it recognizes the fluidity within groups, it considers seriously non-elites analysis, and it concentrates on the dynamic nature of societies in change (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 4–5). However, it is also important to note that hybrid forms of peacebuilding do not always produce peaceful outcomes, causing instead a negative hybrid peace, where local actors might be fragmented, or local involvement might be exclusive or superficial (Simangan 2017).

In summary, the liberal peacebuilding critique emphasized, first, bottom-up approaches focusing on the importance of including civil society actors and local communities in the peacebuilding process and, second, hybrid approaches underlining the understanding that bottom-up mechanisms may coexist with top-down intervention. Adaptive peacebuilding emerges from the recognition that social systems are ontologically complex. It is thus not possible to predetermine what kind of societal arrangement will generate self-sustainable peace, nor is it possible to pre-plan a series of steps that can lead to such a societal arrangement. Peacebuilders thus have to work with the societies in question to try to help them to sustain peace and to further strengthen their resilience to do so in future, by doing while learning and by learning while doing. Epistemologically, this is an inductive iterative process of probing, exploration, and experimentation, together with the communities and societies in question, to find out which interventions are more effective than others, and this requires a continuous process of adaptation and evolution. It is thus a direct contrast to the deductive epistemology of determined-designed approaches to peacebuilding, including the liberal peace approach.

Adaptive peacebuilding thus shares with the hybrid peacebuilding tradition a rejection of imposed determined-design, expert knowledge, and top-down approaches to peacebuilding. Adaptive peacebuilding contributes to the scholarship on local turn by providing a theoretical framework, grounded in complexity theory, that explains why local ownership is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for self-sustainable peace by introducing and explaining the role of self-organization in the ordering of social systems.

Adaptive Peacebuilding

In line with the current peacebuilding challenges and with contemporary armed conflict trends, Cedric de Coning (2018a) developed the adaptive peacebuilding approach, informed by concepts deriving from complexity theory, resilience, and local ownership. Adaptive peacebuilding is a pragmatic and complexity-informed approach where peacebuilders and communities affected by conflict actively engage in a structured process to sustain peace. This framework relies on an iterative peacebuilding process of experimentation, learning, and adaptation. Contrary to imposed liberal peacebuilding projects planned according to the norms and beliefs of external peacebuilders, adaptive peacebuilding is aimed at enabling local societies to develop their own institutions, that is, political and judicial systems aligned with their own history, culture, and context. Therefore, adaptive peacebuilding approaches highlight context-specific local solutions, although international actors may have a role, if requested, in process facilitation (de Coning 2013, 2018a, 2019a, 2020).

Adaptive approaches are also reflected in other peace-related interventions, such as peace mediation or peacemaking. Adaptive mediation reflects a set of strategies and practices to deal with mediation processes in complex environments. The focus is again on resilience, self-organization capacities of the conflict parties, and pragmatism, that is, the context-specific peacemaking process matters more than preexisting international standards, and mediators will act as process facilitators instead of full-fledged stakeholders. To effectively implement adaptive mediation, it is crucial to find a balance between external facilitation and self-organization. Adaptive mediation emerges then as an alternative to traditional determined-designed approaches to peace mediation, with the potential for peacemaking effectiveness in complex conflict systems (de Coning et al. 2022).

An adaptive approach implies a change in the peacebuilders’ mindset. It promotes transformation in the culture of peace organizations, partners, and funders. It facilitates horizontal and vertical participation in the peacebuilding process and focuses on results and allocation of resources to where it is more effective on the ground. To attain its objectives more effectively, adaptive peacebuilding relies not only on an adaptive organizational culture but also on continuous conflict analysis and evaluation and monitoring, as it recognizes the changing nature of complex situations affected by conflict (de Coning 2019b). Determined-designed peacebuilding attempts to avoid duplication and reduces excess capacity, while adaptive peacebuilding focuses on variation for evolution and adaptation, encouraging robustness and resilience in conflict-affected systems. While in determined-designed approaches, cost-effectiveness is achieved by eliminating what was not needed in the past, in adaptive approaches, cost-effectiveness is measured by the cost of adapting to possible futures (de Coning 2019b). In sum, the effectiveness of peacebuilding programs is measured by the ability to adapt to a complex environment (organizational learning) and the ability to sustain peace gains, rather than checking results against predetermined objectives and specifications.

Adaptive peacebuilding is a fundamentally different approach when compared with determined-designed methods. It is agnostic about content, it is focused on process, and its aim is to generate a self-sustainable peace. The content will be determined by the society’s history, culture, political context, and so on, and will emerge from the peacebuilding process itself. The self-sustainability is a product of the participatory process, of the self-organized social institutions that emerge as a result of the participatory process and that give the society the adaptive capacity and resilience needed to manage future shocks and setbacks. In addition, adaptive peacebuilding encourages international peacebuilders—such as multilateral and bilateral agencies and international nongovernmental organizations—to actively support and facilitate self-sustainable peace processes through the active participation of affected people in peace mediation, humanitarian assistance, demobilization disarmament reintegration (DDR), security sector reform (SSR), governance, the reconstruction of economic and social foundations, post-conflict development, and a myriad of other peacebuilding actions. Adaptation thus serves completely different purposes in the determined-designed versus the adaptive peacebuilding approaches. In the determined-designed approach, the destination is predetermined, and adaptation amounts to course-corrections and navigational tactics to accommodate “the weather” along the journey to this end-state. In the adaptive peacebuilding approach, adaptation is the method that perpetually generates the destination, with the note that sustaining peace has no endpoint, so the “destination” is peace attained in the present and immediate future and requires continuous and indefinite adaptation to sustain it.

The Structure of the Book

Considering the current paradigm shift in peacebuilding policy discourses and in the scholarly debates, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development embarked on a three-year research project that has now culminated in this book. Given the urgency and complexity of current armed conflict trends and the lack of effectiveness on the ground of determined-designed peacebuilding interventions in several regions, this book has three main objectives:

  1. 1.

    To explore the UN’s sustaining peace approach as well as one new emerging method for pursuing it, namely adaptive peacebuilding. We intend to make policy audiences aware of alternative peacebuilding approaches in addressing the current challenges related to violent armed conflicts;

  2. 2.

    To assess the potential of adaptive peacebuilding versus determined-designed approaches by considering evidence-based research from seven case studies in four regional contexts—Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America—on how international peacebuilders design, implement, and evaluate peacebuilding programs in contemporary conflict-affected situations. Through empirical research, this study verifies various peacebuilding interactions between external and local actors and how they have facilitated or hindered the peacebuilding process in each case study. The researchers placed particular emphasis on issues related to the complexity of armed conflicts and the adaptiveness of respective peacebuilding interventions; and

  3. 3.

    To shed light on the peacebuilding contributions of two major Asia-Pacific countries supporting peacebuilding actions in complex, protracted, and recurring conflicts. Our aim here is to provide a structured analysis on recent peacebuilding initiatives by relevant non-Western peacebuilding countries, taking China and Japan as case studies, to identify if there has been an evident shift in their peacebuilding approaches and how determined-designed or adaptive their approaches are.

To explore if and how adaptive approaches present an effective alternative pathway to determined-designed approaches to peacebuilding and contribute to sustaining peace in contemporary conflict-affected societies, this edited volume uses two sets of diverse case studies to compare adaptive and determined-designed approaches across a variety of country cases and policy environments. In the first set, the book compares five country cases (Colombia, Mozambique, Palestine, Syria, and Timor-Leste) representative of conflicts in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, covering a diverse range of peace and conflict contexts and peacebuilding actors. In the second set, the book considers the policy approaches of China and Japan and links the policies of these countries to South Sudan in the case of China and the Philippines in the case of Japan. In each case, the authors conducted their research using qualitative methods appropriate to each context but asking the same research questions and following a common research framework (Table 1.1) to generate comparable data.

Table 1.1 Common research framework
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In practice, adaptive peacebuilding is likely to be more abductive than inductive because peacebuilders, or their sending institutions, are likely to have certain guiding principles and values, or they may have to act within certain mandates, while the societies in question also have their own histories, values, customs, and so on. Overall, however, what adaptive peacebuilding approaches have in common is rejection of imposed and predetermined solutions and a commitment to the emergence of context-specific solutions through a process of iterative adaptive learning.

When we set out to look at specific cases, we were conscious that none of them were examples of applied adaptive peacebuilding. Neither the peacebuilders nor the communities in these cases tried to use adaptive peacebuilding. What we needed to identify instead was whether we could find trends and developments that were similar to those that characterize adaptive peacebuilding, and, if so, determine if studying these could tell us something about the effect of context-specific and adaptive approaches on the sustainability of peace processes.

Thus, our question was, “Do context-specific and adaptive approaches (understood as learning from experience) have a more sustainable effect than determined-design approaches?” To pursue this line of enquiry, we asked each of the chapter contributors to attempt to answer the following four questions:

We did not ask contributors to be advocates for adaptive peacebuilding, nor to discuss adaptive peacebuilding per se, as this is not a concept or approach that necessarily informed how peacebuilding was undertaken in their case studies. Rather, we asked them to answer the questions highlighted above that are aimed at understanding the following: (1) if context-specific versus imported determined-designed approaches had more sustainable effects, and (2) if inductive adaptive (learning from experience) versus deductive imported determined-designed approaches had more sustainable effects. (1) and (2) were thus used as proxies for the approach that adaptive peacebuilding advocates, and if they were found to be more effective, this would be an indication that peacebuilding approaches, like adaptive peacebuilding, that are context-specific and adaptive may lead to more sustainable peace outcomes than those that use predetermined imposed solutions.

The primary distinction in the volume, as exemplified in the four questions that all the case studies attempted to grapple with, is between deterministic (top-down, based on imported theories, models, or best practices) or context-specific (bottom-up, informed by local cultural, historic, political context) approaches to peacebuilding. Second, it introduces an alternative approach to the dominant liberal peacebuilding paradigm, namely adaptive peacebuilding, including its foundation in complexity theory, its interlinkage with the concept of resilience, and its relationship with the principle of local ownership. Third, it situates adaptive peacebuilding in the broader sustaining peace concept that has the potential to serve as an overarching, transdisciplinary framework for collective action toward a more comprehensive and enduring approach to peace. Fourth, it compares the effectiveness of determined-designed and adaptive approaches to peace—and especially their capacity to sustain peace—across five diverse conflict-affected situations, namely, Colombia, Mozambique, Palestine, Syria, and Timor-Leste. Fifth, it analyzes the evolving peacebuilding policies of two major East Asian countries, namely, China and Japan, to explore the extent to which their respective approaches to peacebuilding are informed by determined-designed or adaptive approaches or other alternative approaches to peace. In addition, their respective peacebuilding policies are analyzed in two specific country cases, namely South Sudan and in the Southern Philippines, to illustrate the practical application of their policies in a specific context. Sixth, the editors synthesize the findings from the two groups of case study chapters, answer the research question, explore its implications for future peacebuilding policy and practice, and offer recommendations for further research and policy development (Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 The book structure
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In Chap. 2, Cedric de Coning introduces adaptive peacebuilding, its foundation in complexity theory, and explores the implications of complexity thinking for peacebuilding. This chapter discusses the three core characteristics of complexity, namely a holistic systems approach, nonlinearity, and self-organization, while also addressing concepts such as feedback and emergence. In this context, it highlights that international peacebuilding interventions should not interfere in complex social systems with the goal of engineering specific predetermined outcomes. Alternatively, a complexity-informed approach to peacebuilding should safeguard, stimulate, facilitate, and create the space for societies to develop robust and resilient capacities for self-organization. Thus, in contrast with top-down or deterministic approaches to peacebuilding, adaptive peacebuilding is introduced in this chapter as a more effective alternative pathway to sustain peace and resolve conflicts.

In Chap. 3, Youssef Mahmoud argues that the rebranding of various existing UN peacebuilding activities under the new nomenclature of sustaining peace may have contributed to a conceptual muddle, both for member-states and for practitioners. This is largely due to organizations being unable to loosen the choke of the state-centric, liberal moorings that tie the fortunes of peace to the presence or absence of violent conflict. The author calls for a meaningful normative shift by exploring adaptive approaches to peacebuilding that treat peace as a complex dynamic process of becoming rather than an exogenously driven end-state. This chapter unleashes the transformative potential of such approaches and highlights that the UN should deliberately promote system leadership that enables indigenous, self-organizing capacities for peace to emerge and flourish even amid the devastation. The author underlines that marginalized groups—including women and youth—experience peace and conflict differently and that their unique leadership perspectives and roles in sustaining peace are fundamental. The chapter also calls attention to recent advances in thought and practice by the UN around the issue of leadership and brings to the fore alternative peacebuilding narratives that have emerged as part of the paradigmatic breakdowns occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Chap. 4, Lina Penagos explores the impact of the historic peace agreement signed in 2016 by the Colombian government and the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, the FARC-EP. The signature of the peace agreement led to a complex peacebuilding architecture, as almost 13,000 former combatants participated in the reincorporation process, and roughly half of the Colombian inhabitants accepted the agreement according to the referendum of 2016. The author characterizes various peacebuilding practices and adaptations in local communities under the National Reincorporation Policy, stressing that peacebuilding—commonly associated with sustaining economies, justice, the absence of violence, and resilience—requires a significant effort to understand local dynamics between community leaders, government institutions, cooperation agencies, and religious actors. The author highlights that the Colombian case study indicates that although competitive authoritarianism had gained ground by using violence as a means for social control in some local territories, the National Reincorporation Policy has effectively adapted its orientations to boost its peacebuilding initiatives.

In Chap. 5, Rui Saraiva examines how adaptive peacebuilding has been implemented in Mozambique by “localized” international nongovernmental organizations (L-INGOs), such as the Community of Sant’Egidio and the Aga Khan Development Network. Their respective peacebuilding approaches are introduced as key examples of how peacebuilders may contribute to sustaining peace through adaptive peacebuilding amid increasing complexity and uncertainty. Both organizations have been active in many conflict-affected or fragile situations and were able to design and implement effective programs based on institutional learning and context-specific methods. These organizations are fully localized, relying mainly on the contributions of local staff, the key interlocutors to fostering dialogue with local communities, as their presence on the ground is fundamental to the effectiveness of their programs. Due to their long-term commitment to Mozambique, they are able to build contextualized knowledge and build trust with the local population, the Mozambican government, and international donors. They are focused by nature on a context-specific and people-centered approach, adaptive to a constantly changing environment. Following these two examples, the author argues that domestic and international peacebuilders will be able to adapt to an uncertain and complex Mozambican context more effectively if they focus on the facilitation of a process that allows for peace to emerge from within, and if the design, implementation, and evaluation of related peacebuilding programs stimulate the self-organization and resilience necessary in the Mozambican society to manage its own tensions without relapsing into violent conflict.

In Chap. 6, Ryoji Tateyama explores the case of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) as the only international peacekeeping mission deployed inside the occupied Palestinian territories with Israel’s consent. The TIPH withdrew in January 2019 after twenty-two years of operation because Israel did not renew its mandate. The author highlighted that the TIPH stands out as a unique peacekeeping intervention, with a mandate focused on promoting a feeling of security among the Palestinians and with no authority to interfere in any disputes or incidents. Despite its very limited mandate, the TIPH succeeded in deterring violence against Palestinians. Therefore, the chapter analyzes the TIPH’s effectiveness in a context of structural asymmetry from two theoretical perspectives: impartiality and adaptive peacebuilding. The TIPH operated based on the principle of impartiality by trying to deter violence against the weaker side or the most vulnerable in the conflict. In addition, it succeeded in adapting its operations according to the local context by developing broad interactions and cooperation with the local Palestinian communities and societies. The author argues that the TIPH could transform impartiality into an operational principle by taking an adaptive peacebuilding approach and through employing interactive processes with local Palestinians, effectively deterring violence against Palestinian residents, and promoting a feeling of security among them.

In Chap. 7, Ako Muto examines the differences, relations, limitations, and potentials of both determined-designed and locally driven adaptive peacebuilding initiatives in Syria. Amid a myriad of externally driven interventions, the author highlights some examples of locally driven approaches that are contextualized and adaptive to the conflict context: the Civil Society Support Room (CSSR), initiated by the UN’s third Special Envoy and serving as a political channel for Syrian citizens to provide direct inputs to the peace process; and the National Agenda for the Future of Syria (NAFS), established by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), stand as valuable examples of Syrian-led approaches geared toward post-conflict peacebuilding. The author highlights that both programs connect Syrians beyond the location where they are based and beyond their different political positions, and that these programs are able to foster the feeling of solidarity and trust. However, these initiatives also faced considerable challenges in the process of fulfilling their objectives, often affected by the impact of determined-designed interventions and the complex situation on the ground.

In Chap. 8, Yukako Tanaka-Sakabe examines the case of Timor-Leste, a context that has faced emerging social conflicts following its independence in 2002, which also resulted from the top-down-style process of democratization and state-building. The author examined the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration process and the veterans’ issues, exploring how both Timorese and external actors have developed peacebuilding interventions to address emerging instability. In this context, the author focuses on the importance of conflict prevention initiatives at the community level by incorporating traditional conflict resolution practices that aim to mitigate local tensions through mediation and patrolling. The chapter highlights the interactions between peacebuilding stakeholders through the suco (village), which emerge as spaces for self-organization and adaptiveness. This case study demonstrates that peacebuilding efforts in Timor-Leste are essentially adaptive, in a context where the state and society struggle to balance between veterans’ demands, the views of local communities, and the creation of efficient state institutions.

In Chap. 9, Miwa Hirono explores how Chinese peacebuilding actors adapted their peacebuilding approaches and practices in South Sudan and how effective those adaptations have been in sustaining peace. First, the chapter argues that Chinese peacebuilding actors adapted more to the local South Sudanese situation in the late 2010s than a decade ago. Such adaptation, however, was introduced in a “top-down“ manner—not necessarily deriving from China’s experimentation and learning in South Sudan. Rather, it emerged due to the Chinese government’s global policy shift from a sovereignty-centered and hands-off approach to an approach based on a more flexible interpretation of sovereignty. The author also underlines that while the Chinese government’s approach to peacebuilding allowed for context-specificity, it was extended only to the South Sudanese government. On the other hand, regarding the vulnerable populations in South Sudan, China’s peacebuilding approach remained deterministic or indifferent, ultimately affecting the effectiveness of China’s peacebuilding initiatives in the country.

In Chap. 10, Miyoko Taniguchi examines the impact of violence and multilayered armed conflicts that have prevailed over the last four decades in Mindanao (now Bangsamoro), despite the signing of ceasefire and peace agreements between the government of the Philippines and the Islamic insurgents, and the respective peacebuilding activities on the ground. In this context, the author explores Japan’s peacebuilding approach and its aid principles of request-based assistance, self-reliance, ownership, and capacity development. With the growing recognition of the failure of liberal peacebuilding, this chapter argues how the Japanese assistance to “peacebuilding” in Bangsamoro since the late 1990s has incrementally contributed to sustainable peace, synchronizing all efforts around development, diplomacy, and security from a non-Western perspective. The chapter also examines the contributions of multilayered stakeholders and respective vertical and horizontal links, describing the Japanese intermediatory role in all aspects of the peacebuilding process. This intermediatory role underpinning aid norms with diverse stakeholders can be expressed as “process facilitation” in the adaptive peacebuilding discourse, and it emerges as an example of adaptive practices in any contemporary conflict-affected situations.

Conclusions

This edited volume is designed to speak directly to the policy, practitioner, and research communities engaged in peacebuilding by providing a critical analysis of the strengths and limits of contemporary peacebuilding practices. It questions the dominant determined-designed peacebuilding paradigm—that is, liberal peacebuilding—and its respective practices and introduces and explores the effectiveness of alternative approaches such as adaptive peacebuilding and sustaining peace that are designed for coping with uncertainty and the increasing complexity of contemporary armed conflicts.

The book assesses the application of the adaptive approach and the sustaining peace concept using seven empirical case studies, which represent a diverse range of complex conflict situations, at different stages of the peace process, and with a variety of peacebuilding programs being implemented by a diverse range of peacebuilding actors (global, national, and local; public and private; community, religious, development, and political) to test, contextualize, and further explore the theoretical and conceptual arguments of both adaptive peacebuilding and sustaining peace. Moreover, as peacebuilding has until recently been dominated by the West and the liberal peace ideology, this book explores the peacebuilding approaches of two major countries in the Asia-Pacific region, China and Japan, and considers how geopolitical shifts will influence the future of peacebuilding. Finally, in the context of the current peacebuilding debates, this book analyzes the key role of national and local actors in the peacebuilding process and highlights the role of these actors in making adaptive peacebuilding approaches work on the ground.

In this introductory chapter, we highlighted the fact that determined-designed peacebuilding approaches have been dominant in the post-Cold War period, and that international peacebuilders have often addressed the root causes of armed conflict by designing interventions that are unable to adapt to complex and fast-changing environments. Liberal peacebuilding and its top-down interventionism have failed to effectively address the complexity of contemporary armed conflicts, and its prescriptive peacebuilding interventions have been measuring progress against the degree to which a society has been transformed based on prescribed external values. Alternatively, context-specific peacebuilding approaches have been emerging as a viable alternative to determined-designed interventions. Context-specific approaches highlight the importance of local agencies for peacebuilding to become more sustainable within the broader spectrum of the peace process. In particular, adaptive peacebuilding encourages external peacebuilders to act as process facilitators rather than fully-fledged stakeholders of the peace process. Adaptive peacebuilding does not put forward a prescriptive recipe for peace, and results are assessed considering the degree to which a society can self-sustain peace. Thus, peacebuilding initiatives in the twenty-first century have more potential for effectiveness if they are implemented based on the balance between discreet process facilitation by international partners and promoting the self-organization capabilities of systems affected by conflict.