What is the key to lasting peace in an unpredictable world?

Today's conflicts are protracted, unpredictable and complex. Yet for decades, much of international peacebuilding has relied on one-size-fits-all solutions. The thinking behind this has been that experts – peacebuilders – can identify the cause of a conflict and then prescribe ready-made solutions, often based on measures that have worked in conflicts elsewhere.

But building peace is not like building a house, where you can follow a blueprint and put up one plank at a time according to a set timeline. That is the warning from the researchers behind the new book The Adaptive Peacebuilding Guidebook (de Coning, Tsuchiya and Muto, 2026), which launches on 2 October. Peacebuilding is more like gardening. You can fertilise, water and weed, but in the end you must let the garden grow at its own pace.

The new book offers practical, concrete advice on an approach to peacebuilding that recognises that every conflict is complex and unique. The approach is called Adaptive Peacebuilding. Being adaptive means being flexible. Throughout the process, you keep learning from the feedback your efforts generate, and continuously adjust what you do based on those lessons.

A fundamental error

The core idea is that lasting peace cannot be delivered or imposed from the outside. It must grow from within.

"I believe the peacebuilding community have made a fundamental category error over the past 20 to 30 years. We mistook truly complex problems for merely complicated ones." says Cedric de Coning. He elaborates:

"The mistake we have made is to assume that peace is a problem that can be solved. We believed that peacebuilding and development experts have the agency to diagnose a conflict in a way that can identify a specific problem that needs to be solved.”

"Not like fixing a car"

According to the NUPI researcher, however, this has not worked well enough:

"When our interventions have not resolved the conflicts in Afghanistan, Mali, the DRC, South Sudan or Yemen, to name a few examples, we have tended to blame a lack of data, or poor analysis, or bad leadership, or insufficient political will, or poor coordination, or corruption, or spoilers such as armed groups."

All these problems matter, de Coning stresses. But he believes it is even more important to revisit the basic assumptions underlying peacebuilding.

"We have approached societies affected by conflict as if they were a machine we can fix, or a patient we can heal. Social conflict is not a complicated, linear and predictable problem that can be fixed like a car or a bridge. Social-ecological problems, that is, problems where people, societies and their environment affect each other, are complex – not just as a metaphor, but according to the scientific criteria that we use to identify complex systems. They are highly dynamic and non-linear, and they are self-organising, emergent and adaptive."

This makes such conflicts both uncertain and unpredictable, de Coning explains.

"It is not possible to design a solution and know with sufficient confidence what the effects of such a project will be before we have implemented it."

"Dramatic failure"

Earlier research shows a link between two things: whether peacebuilding efforts are tailored to the specific context of a conflict, and whether the result is in fact sustainable peace. One example is the book Adaptive Peacebuilding: A New Approach to Sustaining Peace in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). The new guidebook turns these research findings into practical and operational guidance for peacebuilders and aid workers.

De Coning developed the concept of Adaptive Peacebuilding by applying complexity theory to peace and conflict studies. He draws on decades of relevant experience, both as a researcher and on the ground. He is a former South African diplomat and has served as a UN peacekeeper.

• Listen to "The World Stage": Adaptive peace: A new way of thinking about peacebuilding

So why is this book needed now?

"After the dramatic failure of the international intervention in Afghanistan and the coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in the Sahel, the international peacebuilding and development community is re-thinking the role and effectiveness of peacebuilding and development assistance more broadly. The current debate in Norway about the future of development aid is part of this wider trend," de Coning explains.

Farewell to old models

Against this backdrop, Adaptive Peacebuilding offers a new approach. It is designed to deal with the uncertainty that always comes with supporting complex transitions from conflict to peace.

• Listen to "The World Stage": Resilience, peacebuilding, and preventing violent extremism

"It is based on an inductive approach to understanding conflict and an emergent approach to sustaining peace. Peacebuilders and the people affected by conflict work together to strengthen resilience and sustain peace through a process of learning from doing. In this way, peace emerges from practice and experience."

This means saying farewell to a model of peacebuilding built on determined-design donor-funded projects. In that model, experts analyse the conflict, design solutions and implement them in "consultation" with local communities.

• Also read: New book: Adaptive Mediation and conflict resolution

"Adaptive Peacebuilding is a process of becoming, where local communities have the primary role and agency, with professional peacebuilders providing technical support, facilitation and resources. As such, it is a radical shift away from the prescriptive peacebuilding approaches of the past 20 to 30 years," the NUPI researcher explains.

Must not interfere too much

Many organisations are increasingly integrating adaptive approaches in their work. The new book includes case studies from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the Swedish Agency for Peace and Development (Folke Bernadotte Acadamy), the UN Peacebuilding Fund and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

"Overall, however, donors and parliaments want the assurance that the funds they invest in peace and development will be used in ways that are effective. This is an absolutely reasonable expectation. However, in the past it incentivised a system where those working in the field had to design projects that had pre-determined outcomes and causal paths, in order for them to receive funding."

• Listen to "The World Stage": The past, present and future of peacekeeping

De Coning is clear when asked about the single most important change peacebuilders need to make:

"The key mindset change that is needed is for peacebuilders to grasp that for peace to be sustainable, it needs to emerge from within the lived experience of societies themselves. Peacebuilders can support that process, but if they interfere too much, they actually disrupt the opportunity for these communities to develop their own social institutions that are needed to sustain peace. So, it is a mind-shift change in where the agency to sustain peace lies. Closely linked is the understanding that peace can't be designed and implemented; it has to emerge from an adaptive process of learning from experience."