Cedric H. de Coning

Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation

This book addresses the core dilemma that practitioners have to confront: how to function in situations that are fast changing and complex, when equipped with tools designed for neither? How do we reconcile the tension between the use of linear causal logic and the dynamic political transitions that interventions are meant to assist? Insights from Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation covers the design, evaluation, and learning for international interventions aiming to promote peace. More specifically, it reconceptualises this space by critically analysing mainstream approaches – presenting both conceptual and empirical content. This volume offers a variety of original and insightful contributions to the debates grappling with the adoption of complexity thinking. Readers will be given a rare opportunity to superimpose the latest conceptual innovations with the latest case study applications and from a diverse spectrum of organisational vantage points. This provides the myriad practitioners and consultants in this space with invaluable insights as to how to improve their trade craft, while ensuring policy makers and the accompanying research/academic industry have clearer guidance and innovative thinking. This edited volume provides critically innovative offerings for the audiences that make up this broad area’s practitioners, researchers/academics/educators, and consultants, as well as policy makers.

Introduction: Assessing the impact of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture

The future of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture

Protecting civilians: comparing organisational approaches

UN Peacebuilding Architecture: The First 10 Years

Since its establishment, the UN's Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) has been involved in peacebuilding processes in more than 20 countries. This edited volume takes stock of the overall impact of the PBA during its first decade in existence, and generates innovative recommendations for how the architecture can be modified and utilized to create more synergy and fusion between the UN's peace and development work. The volume is based on commissioned research and independent evaluations as well as informed opinions of several key decision-makers closely engaged in shaping the UN's peacebuilding agenda. It seeks to find a balance between identifying the reality and constraints of the UN's multilateral framework, while being bold in exploring new and innovative ways in which the UN can enhance the results of its peace and development work through the PBA. The research and writing of each chapter has been guided by four objectives: to assess the overall impact of the PBA; to generate innovative ideas for how the PBA can be made more effective post-2015; to analyze the PBA’s role at the nexus of the UN's peace and development work; and to consider what would be required for the PBA to increase and improve its impact in future. It will be of interest to diplomats, UN officials, the policy community and scholars engaged in the debate following the 2015 review and the implementation of its recommendations, and will be an essential resource for UN and peacebuilding scholars.

Civil-Military Interaction: Rationale, Possibilities and Limitations

Future of African Peace Operations: From Janjaweed to Boko Haram

Peace Capacities Network Synthesis Report: Rising Powers and Peace Operations

This report presents the research of the Peace Capacities Network into the policies and roles of a select group of so-called ‘rising powers’ in international peace operations and UN peacekeeping reform. The case studies are from Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Norway, Russia, South Africa and Turkey.

From peacebuilding to sustaining peace: Implications of complexity for resilience and sustainability

Towards an African Model of Peace Operations