Over the past decade, and in response to continuing challenges in peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, progressively more scholars have identified complexity theory as a valuable tool for understanding conflict and informing peace intervention. This work, however, is diverse and disconnected, with scholars working in different disciplines, with a diversity of methods, and on many distinct cases and studying various dynamics of conflict and peace.
Based on a call for proposals we have selected 20 scholars to present ongoing research, recent publications, and working papers, and have clustered them together in 4 panels.
Authors and abstracts:
Authors and Abstracts
Watch this introduction to the workshop:
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Panel Schedule
Thursday, 2 September, 15:00 – 17:00 (CET, Oslo)
Chair: Gearoid Millar
Claudio Alberti, Roland Dittli and Laurent Goetschel: Complexity-Oriented MEAL and Conflict Sensitivity: Learning from Complex Programs in Fragile Contexts
Sayra van den Berg and Walt Kilroy: Using Systems Thinking to Understand the Interaction between Transitional Justice and the Reintegration of Ex-Combatants
Lance Bradley: De-Facto Statehood and its Impact on Post-Conflict Rebuilding in the Donbas
Czeslaw Mesjasz: The Ideas of Complex Systems in the Works of Leading Scholars in Peace and Conflict Studies
Thursday, 2 September, 17:30 – 19:30 (CET, Oslo)
Chair: Roger Mac Ginty
Lara Olson: Getting Peacebuilding Beyond the Linear at the Operational Level
Eric Tanguay and Jinelle Piereder: Much Ado About Nothing? The Instrumentalization of Complexity and Local Ownership Rhetoric in Peacebuilding
Roger Mac Ginty: Quantum Peace and Conflict
Emery Brusset: Is Ethnographic Attribution Possible? A Possible Way to Apply Evaluation to Community Dialogue
Friday, 3 September, 15:00 – 17:00 (CET, Oslo)
Chair: Cedric de Coning
Lord John Alderdice: Conflict, Complexity and Cooperation
Stephen Gray: Power Dynamics in Peacebuilding Relationality: Vertical Integration and the Network View in Myanmar
Olga Vorkunova: Dialogue, Understanding and Misunderstanding: Peacebuilding and Complex Identity in the Trinity Sea System
Gearoid Millar: Escaping Conflict Systems: Peace Processes, Peacebuilding, and the Promise of Adjacent Attractors
Friday, 3 September, 17:30 – 19:30 (CET, Oslo)
Chair: Lara Olson
Cedric de Coning: Adaptive Mediation: Leveraging Knowledge Sharing to Make and Sustain Peace
Megan Greeley: Examining the 'How' of Adaptive Peacebuilding Praxis from a Postcolonial Indigenous Research Paradigm
Aviva Silburt: Complex Systems Theory as a Tool to Navigate Peacebuilding Challenges in Research and Practice: Experience from Mining Conflicts in Guatemala
David Wilkinson: The Complexity of Wars and the “Nuclear Peace”
