Event

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”