Download or read book Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation written by Emery Brusset and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book 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. Insights from Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation 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? 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.

Download or read book Peace Complexity Visuality written by Rasmus Bellmer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book United Nations peace operations and International Relations theory written by Kseniya Oksamytna and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United Nations peace operations have undergone multiple transformations over the more than seventy years of their existence. Multidimensional peace operations have organised elections, helped deliver humanitarian assistance, advised on army and police reform, and fought rebel groups. Such operations not only represent a core pillar of the multilateral peace and security architecture but also fundamentally reshape lives of millions of people around the world. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of multiple theoretical perspectives on UN peace operations. It offers practical examples of how International Relations theories apply to specific policy issues and simultaneously demonstrates how major debates on UN peace operations - on civilian protection, local ownership, or gender mainstreaming - benefit from theoretical exploration. With insightful contributions from a range of international academics, UN peace operations and International Relations theory is an essential book for scholars, students, and experts working on peace and security and the broader issue of international cooperation.

Download or read book Small Scale Evaluation written by Colin Robson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evaluation research can assess the value and effectiveness of interventions and innovations involving people. While this has often been on a grand scale, this book focuses on small-scale projects carried out by an individual or small group, typically lasting for weeks or at most a few months, at a local rather than national level. Using limited jargon and featuring integrated, real-world examples, this second edition offers a clear, accessible background to evaluation and prepares you to undertake your own small-scale evaluation research project. Key features include discussion of: Different approaches to evaluation and how to choose between them The advantages and disadvantages of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) Realist evaluation and its increasing importance The centrality of ethical and political issues The influence and opportunity of the Internet Tightly focused on the realities of carrying out small-scale evaluation, Small-Scale Evaluation is a highly practical guide covering the needs of both social scientists and others without this background. Colin Robson is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Human & Health Sciences at the University of Huddersfield.

Download or read book Governing Complexity in the 21st Century written by Neil E. Harrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governing Complexity in the 21st Century surveys the ways in which social systems are becoming more complex. It shows how this complexity impacts every aspect of life for individuals, governments and societies in most social systems at individual, regional, national and global scales and explores how embracing ‘complexity thinking’ can greatly improve the art of governance in all policy areas. The book clearly explains the ideas and methods of complexity science—widely accepted in both the natural and social sciences—then demonstrates how ‘complexity thinking’ can be applied to improve our understanding of governance and policy actions. Providing a deep analysis of many governance challenges, including economic development and technological innovation, environment management, climate change and development in the Middle East, the book also compares national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clear and jargon-free, this book is accessible to undergraduates and scholars alike. It is essential reading for policymakers everywhere, showcasing methods for governing effectively and efficiently in our increasingly complex world. It brings together the broad range of social and environmental science fields and will be useful for those studying or working in policy, politics and international relations, environmental issues, business management, philosophy, history and sociology.

Download or read book Are We Making a Difference written by Stacey L. Connaughton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the world experiences heightened levels of violent conflict and polarization, understanding what peacebuilding efforts are “effective” becomes all the more pressing. This groundbreaking edited volume brings together a diverse, global group of practitioners, researchers, and peacebuilders to grapple with urgent questions and challenges related to defining and assessing peacebuilding effectiveness. Sections of the book engage in critical reflection on what peacebuilding effectiveness is and who gets to decide, provide practical examples and case studies of the successes and failures of assessing peacebuilding work, and support innovative strategies and tools to move the field forward. Chapters reflect a variety of perspectives on peacebuilding effectiveness and methods—quantitative, qualitative, and participatory—to evaluate peacebuilding efforts, with particular attention to approaches that center those local to the peacebuilding process. Practitioners and policymakers alike will find useful arguments and approaches for evaluating peacebuilding activities and making the case for funding such efforts. This book aims to catalyze conversation and action among peacebuilding practitioners, academics, donors, and those directly affected by peacebuilding efforts about how we define and measure effectiveness.

Download or read book Entangled Peace written by Ignasi Torrent and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book unfolds an exploratory journey intended to scrutinise the suitability of entanglements and relations as a mode of thinking and seeing peacebuilding events. Through a reflection upon the UN’s limited results in the endeavour towards securing lasting peace in war-torn scenarios, Torrent critically engages with three relevant debates in contemporary peacebuilding literature, including the inclusion of ‘the locals’, the achievement of organisational system-wide coherence and the increasingly questioned agential condition of peacebuilding actors. Inattentive to the relational vulnerability of involved stakeholders, it is suggested that the UN seeks to secure a totalising modern distory, defined in the book as a story that undoes other stories. Whilst affirming the entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes in the conflict-affected configuration, Entangled Peace also delves into a cautionary argument about what the author refers to as entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, normative, deterministic and exclusionary projection of a relational world. Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, Entangled Peace is an invitation to speculate over the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader theatre of the real, as radical openness, in which events emanate from the collision of an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds.

Download or read book Adaptive Peacebuilding written by Cedric de Coning and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book responds to the urgent need to improve how we prevent and resolve conflict. It introduces Adaptive Peacebuilding through evidence-based research from eight case studies across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. It also considers how China and Japan view and practice peacebuilding. The book focuses on how peacebuilders design, implement and evaluate programs to sustain peace, how interactions between external and local actors have facilitated or hindered peacemaking, and how adaptation to complexity and uncertainty occurred in each case study.

Download or read book States of Disorder Ecosystems of Governance written by Adam Day and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's vision of world order is founded upon the concept of strong, well-functioning states, in contrast to the destabilizing potential of failed or fragile states. This worldview has dominated international interventions over the past 30 years as enormous resources have been devoted to developing and extending the governance capacity of weak or failing states, hoping to transform them into reliable nodes in the global order. But with very few exceptions, this project has not delivered on its promise: countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remain mired in conflict despite decades of international interventions. States of Disorder addresses the question, 'Why has UN state-building so consistently failed to meet its objectives?'. It proposes an explanation based on the application of complexity theory to UN interventions in South Sudan and DRC, where the UN has been tasked to implement massive stabilization and state-building missions. Far from being ''ungoverned spaces," these settings present complex, dynamical systems of governance with emergent properties that allow them to adapt and resist attempts to change them. UN interventions, based upon assumptions that gradual increases in institutional capacity will lead to improved governance, fail to reflect how change occurs in these systems and may in fact contribute to underlying patterns of exclusion and violence. Based on more than a decade of the author's work in peacekeeping, this book offers a systemic mapping of how governance systems work, and indeed work against, UN interventions. Pursuing a complexity-driven approach instead helps to avoid unintentional consequences, identifies meaningful points of leverage, and opens the possibility of transforming societies from within.

Download or read book Operationalisation of Hybrid Peacebuilding in Asia written by Yuji Uesugi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book was refined and solidified especially during the international workshop on 'Reconstructing the Architecture of International Peacebuilding' held between 11th-13th September 2019 at the Global Asia Research Centre, Waseda University [...]." (Acknowledgments).

Download or read book The Forever Crisis written by Adam Day and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an introduction to complex systems thinking at the global governance level. It offers concepts, tools, and ways of thinking about how systems change that can be applied to the most wicked problems facing the world today. More than an abstract argument for complexity theory, the book offers a targeted critique of today’s highest-profile proposals for improving the governance of our environment, security, finance, health, and digital space. It suggests that we should spend less effort and resources on upgrading existing institutions, and more on understanding how they (and we) relate to each other. The volume will be essential reading for public policymakers, NGOs and think tanks, foreign policy experts, government officials, and global decision-makers.

Download or read book Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding written by Elisa Randazzo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the logic behind the shifts and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peacebuilding. In particular, the book is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered how we think about peacebuilding beyond the ‘liberal peacebuilding’ paradigm. To do so, the book engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peacebuilding, from hands-on institutionalisation, to the ‘local turn’. It uses the case of Kosovo to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards more invasive and intrusive forms of peacebuilding first. However, it is also crucial to understanding the recent local turn, as the rise of local ownership discourses in Kosovo is fundamentally tied to the critiques of extensive international missions, and the associated resistance and marginalisation of local agency. The book examines the implications of the framing of ‘everyday’ agency in order to assess the extent to which these bottom-up approaches have been able to by-pass the problems attributed to the liberal peace approach. It argues that despite its critical and radical intentions, the local turn retains certain foundational modernist and positivist qualities that have so far characterised the very mainstream approaches these critiques claim to transcend. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, statebuilding, peace and conflict studies, security studies and International Relations in general.

Download or read book Peace in Political Unsettlement written by Jan Pospisil and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International peacebuilding has reached an impasse. Its lofty ambitions have resulted in at best middling success, punctuated by moments of outright failure. The discrediting of the term ‘liberal peacebuilding’ has seen it evolve to respond to the numerous critiques. Notions such as ‘inclusive peace’ merge the liberal paradigm with critical notions of context, and the need to refine practices to take account of ‘the local’ or ‘complexity’. However, how this would translate into clear guidance for the practice of peacebuilding is unclear. Paradoxically, contemporary peacebuilding policy has reached an unprecedented level of vagueness. Peace in political unsettlement provides an alternative response rooted in a new discourse, which aims to speak both to the experience of working in peace process settings. It maps a new understanding of peace processes as institutionalising formalised political unsettlement and points out new ways of engaging with it. The book points to the ways in which peace processes institutionalise forms of disagreement, creating ongoing processes to manage it, rather than resolve it. It suggests a modest approach of providing ‘hooks’ to future processes, maximising the use of creative non-solutions, and practices of disrelation, are discussed as pathways for pragmatic post-war transitions. It is only by understanding the nature and techniques of formalised political unsettlement that new constructive ways of engaging with it can be found.

Download or read book Peacebuilding Legacy written by Sukanya Podder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fundamental challenge plagues the global peacebuilding community. How can technocratic approaches to peacebuilding that are rooted in short-term, project-based execution of activities, further the longer-term transformative outcomes like altering young people's attitudes and beliefs about peace and violence? In response to this global challenge, in Peacebuilding Legacy, Sukanya Podder analyzes the long-term effects of peacebuilding programmes involving children and young people. Podder unpacks the concept of peacebuilding legacy through the lens of time, transformation, and intergenerational peace. Podder also develops unique qualitative cues for measuring legacy in terms of the institutional, normative, and organizational logics. If norms resonate strongly with the local context, they are likely to encourage strong retention and meaningful adoption over time. Successful institutionalization of project models through planned handover to successor national organizations, or government departments, holds the key to stronger local ownership. Organizational learning and reflection can support this process through a more strategic approach to programming, and through post-exit studies. Regarding attitude change, Podder found that, the media and peace education projects that targeted individuals' ingrained beliefs and values but overlooked the role of group social norms had only limited persuasive effects. To shift the values, practices, norms, and beliefs of the younger generation, the mindset of the older generation must also be targeted. Changes in the legal, political, economic, and other social institutions are critical for long-term and meaningful transformation. This requires adopting an ecological model of peace.

Download or read book The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies written by Oliver P. Richmond and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 1796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopaedia provides a comprehensive overview of major theories and approaches to the study of peace and conflict across different humanities and social sciences disciplines. Peace and conflict studies (PCS) is one of the major sub-disciplines of international studies (including political science and international relations), and has emerged from a need to understand war, related systems and concepts and how to respond to it afterward. As a living reference work, easily discoverable and searchable, the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies offers solid material for understanding the foundational, historical, and contemporary themes, concepts, theories, events, organisations, and frameworks concerning peace, conflict, security, rights, institutions and development. The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Peace and Conflict Studies brings together leading and emerging scholars from different disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource on peace and conflict studies ever produced.

Download or read book Researching the Inner Life of the African Peace and Security Architecture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on intellectual openness and an interest in transdisciplinary perspectives, this edited volume introduces scholars of African Peace and Security to innovative methodological and conceptual approaches, offering new insights into the inner life of APSA.

Download or read book Deferring Peace in International Statebuilding written by Pol Bargués-Pedreny and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the last 25 years of international peacebuilding and recasts them as a growing crisis of confidence in universal ideas of peacebuilding and self-government. Since current peacebuilding interventions are abandoning domineering, top-down and linear methodologies, and experimenting with context-sensitive, self-reflexive and locally driven strategies, the book makes two suggestions. The first is that international policymakers are embracing some of the critiques of liberal peace. For more than a decade, scholarly critiques have pointed out the need to focus on everyday dynamics and local initiatives and resistances to liberal peace in order to enable hybrid and long-term practice-based strategies of peacebuilding. Now, the distance between the policy discourse and critical frameworks has narrowed. The second suggestion is that in stepping away from liberal peace, a transvaluation of peacebuilding values is occurring. Critiques are beginning to accept and valorise that international interventions will continuously fail to produce sensitive results. The earlier frustrations with unexpected setbacks, errors or contingencies are ebbing away. Instead, critiques normalise the failure to promote stability and peace. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, international intervention, conflict resolution, international organisations and security studies in general.