OxPeace 2022 Session 1

Chair: Professor Richard Caplan, Associate Professor of International Relations, Oxford

Professor John Paul Lederach presents:

"The patient stitching of impermanent peace: Four evolutions along the personal journey"

Across four decades, experience suggests that peace has remained elusive while the questions of who builds peace and how coordination among initiatives and actors in dynamic situations coheres has remained a constant challenge. Through personal reflection on practice and inductive theory-building, four emergent evolutions of thought will be explored around this reality of impermanence with its significant paradoxes, dilemmas, gaps, and what seems to constitute essential tenets of peacebuilding.

Dr Thania Paffenholz presents:

"Rethinking peacebuilding in a world out of order"

The war in Ukraine is starkly illustrating that existing systems to build peace are out of order. Should they be adapted, or do we need a wholesale rethink of the notion of peacebuilding? I argue that we should radically reconsider fundamental concepts of peacebuilding like peace processes, tracks, and the binary notions of success and failure and of negative and positive peace in order to reach a reality-based understanding of peacebuilding as the recurrent renegotiation of the social and political contract of societies, policies, and states towards pathways to peace. We thereby need to embrace the reality of messiness, progress, and backlash, and never lose sight of our creativity and will to change what we can change. I will demonstrate this from my personal perspective as a researcher and practitioner with different examples including Ukraine.