Justpeace

As I look back across twenty years of working for nonviolence, conflict transformation, and reconciliation and as I reflect on the recent decades of peace accords two things stand out. First, objective assessment suggests there are significant gaps in our capacity to build and sustain peace initiatives. Second, direct interaction with these processes provokes contagious hope.

The hope is rooted in the resiliency of people…who, in spite of decades of obstacles and violence, keep taking steps toward peaceful coexistence with their enemies…The gaps emerge from a reductionism focused on techniques driven by a need to find quick fixes and solutions to complex, long-term problems rather than a systemic understanding of peacebuilding as a process-structure. In this short chapter I will suggest that we must do two things to address this challenge. We must identify several key gaps that emerge from recent peacebuilding experiences and we must develop an adequate language appropriate to the hopes we hold…