It's a very great pleasure to welcome you all both here at Kings and also online. My name is Mathis Burdall and I'm Professor in the Department of War Studies and I'm very very pleased to be able to chair this seminar and book launch. It's lovely to be able to introduce Sukanya Poder, who is as you will know a reader here at Kings, a reader in post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding and of course equally great pleasure to welcome my old friend. We only meet on these kinds of occasions. So thank you very much for doing this. I know just how busy you are. I won't say very much. I had the pleasure and the honor of chairing this so I might say something a little bit later but I do want to flag, if I may, the importance of this particular book. I was reading it last week and again today and I think it genuinely is one of those books that fills a very important gap in the literature. I mean, I think a great deal of the work on peacebuilding over the past 10-15 years has been to demonstrate how what we often now refer to as technocratic approach to peacebuilding is not very effective and indeed often produces perverse and unintended consequences. So initially when I picked up this book I thought perhaps this is what Sukanya is going to do just to reinforce that message and to some extent she does but also importantly I think you try to show how we can actually get away from this impasse of saying that technocratic peacekeeping doesn't work. Where do we go from here? And I was very struck by your central argument which is the immense and I quote transformative potential at the heart of also technocratic peacebuilding and I think that's of particular interest I think for not just for policymakers but also academics that we are where we are with respect to the legacies of these building but how do we move from here and even within the context of a sort of technocratic model we can move forward. The other I think very important contribution you make here is really to think about the long-term legacies of peacebuilding and that is inherently going to be very very difficult and because it's so difficult few people have really done it systematically and you tend to fall back as policymakers often do on the kind of short-term wins involved in peacebuilding exercises and I think you've not just demonstrated with respect to case studies but also given us a framework for thinking about what those long-term legacies might be both in terms of norms what do we actually communicate what do we transmit over time in terms of the institutional and organizational legacies and I think that's enormously important and helpful for thinking about it and third but not least of course you have a very explicit focus on on children and young people and that's a supposed a little bit poignant as we watch the horrific scenes today of the war in Ukraine and of course it is the intergenerational dimension of this we've got to think more about than we've done in the past and I think your book does an important contribution to that as well and the great thing about having fun me here is that I know in addition to all the other important work she does this is something which you've had a long standing interest in yourself not least the whole issue of children youth and peacebuilding so we have a stellar combination of speakers here so I won't say anything more but the floor is yours actually I should say something about the running of things let me just say this those who are joining us on zoom if you have questions which I hope you will and I'm sure you will have please send them to Anna put them in the box and we'll we'll respond to them that way and then those who are here please join us afterwards for a bit of lots of wine as it turns out now because we're not you know we're not 16 with the number still and some food afterwards and we can continue the discussion then okay floor is yours thank you Matt's and put me for being here I think this is a great pleasure to celebrate not only this book but also the kind of work we do over so many years and this book is a pure labor of love it's taken a very long time and I'm immensely happy and grateful to be able to share my findings but also just generally some of the reflections in terms of this research so thank you for coming everybody and also those who are online I have a little bit of a presentation because I thought it was easier to communicate the arguments. Professor Badal here had written a book a few years back about building peace after war and it's important because we are faced with a fundamental challenge of so many people nearly more than two billion who live in countries which are affected by conflict and therefore conflict prevention efforts peace building efforts are significant areas of international engagement whether it's by donors billions of dollars have been invested by the United Nations by various donor governments in the name of peace building yet we don't really know very much or we know very little let's say if this money is being well spent beyond short term monitoring and evaluation outputs of various projects and this is in some ways a motivation the puzzle you know which made me write this because 15 years are spent in different countries whether it's Liberia in West Africa South Sudan in Mindanao in various conflict affected countries working with children young people both as a academic researcher but also as a consultant to a range of governmental intergovernmental non-governmental organizations and this kind of deep engagement practical engagement can make me think and reflect on what happens to the beneficiaries to the participants of various peace building projects years after these projects have folded up and also what sort of learning and reflection happens on part of or does not on part of various donors who fund and sponsor these programs not to mention the various NGOs which you know implement these programs so this is sort of the puzzle we started way back in 2007 eight when I was in Liberia doing fieldwork now we really it's kind of important here to sorry this I have not been moving this clearly it's it's sort of important to think about some of the reality checks with peace building when you think about peace building in terms of the real work or what how it unfolds it's a very dynamic process it's gradual it's incremental it's evolutionary it's long-term but the way that we do the work of peace building is time bound it's tied to various kinds of objectives that donors set and the effectiveness of peace building which is a really big debate in the field is tied to these short-term monitoring and evaluation tools in terms of you know how did you deliver what are the outputs that you delivered from various projects so in a sense there is no ability to pause to think to reflect on the long-term or we don't even have the methodological tools for long-term evaluation right so what that means is very little longitudinal research very little follow-up research happens with various project participants years after these projects close and many many NGOs are in country for 10-15 years and we kind of lose that kind of archival data that is produced during the lifecycle of various projects and therefore when we turn the lens to understanding peace building legacy you know by peace building legacy how I conceptualize it I look at long-term effects of 10 to 15 years of various interventions that are being attempted let's say by NGOs and I worked in partnership with a particular NGO and I'll talk about it in a little bit but in terms of conceptualizing there were three lens that I used one was time the other was transformation and the third was intergenerational peace and then also in terms of measurement there were three qualitative cues normative organization institutional logics which I will talk about shortly now what do I mean by time again reiterating that for policymakers and donors it's all about policy time bureaucratic lockdown time-bound projects financial accountability and so much of the work of peace building is about performance or showing or doing and it's about outputs it's about activities it's about this busyness and tick box learning and when I say transformation you know inherently conflict transformation is a long-drawn process but peace building is tied to this time-bound you know essence of projects therefore there's a fundamental misalignment when it comes to how we fund the objectives around building peace and how we seek accountability for the money that is being spent but the methodological tools in terms of capturing the long-term changes do not exist and therefore in effect what we are trying is we're aspiring through peace building to bring about this transformation in young people or you know people's lives in these countries affected by conflict but what we are the way that we are delivering it is very much time-bound technical activity which is rooted in short term impact so the other point here and you know I develop intergenerational peace as a new project with the HRC next year in Indonesia I've been really fortunate but very few people think about conflicts in terms of generational experiences and they are if you think about Palestine Kashmir South Sudan all these conflicts have been going on for decades and the different generations have different experiences of conflicts and therefore when you're trying to build peace the generational needs are different and very often peace building does not address intergenerational lens when it comes to the different needs of different generations and I think that is a really important area that I want to come back to now in terms of methodological choices obviously how do I go about doing this because it wasn't quite possible to have all this data so I went into a knowledge production partnership with a large peace building organization multi-country and I did field work in two countries Sierra Leone and North Macedonia but I also worked with their institutional learning teams in headquarters in Washington DC and also in the field in various regional headquarters and of course the two countries now this is one of the things I want to share with students who are here in terms of longitudinal data there's this huge amount of resource from the evaluations from the archives of institutional memory internal communications not every peace building organization is willing to share but if they are this is this incredible mine of information that you can take it and I was very fortunate to have access to this because I could look at the various theories of change I could look at the various projects what they were delivering what sort of norms they were transmitting so this was one of the approaches I took and I used the metahethnographic model to kind of framework to analyze this data now one of the things I look at is also about non-transmission that's is referred to it quickly but the values that are being transmitted through various projects you know how far they resonate with the beneficiaries you know what happens in terms of how they behave over the long term their families and how far they resonate particularly with the local values you know this local turning peace building we talk a lot about it but we don't really think about the resonance and retention of norms the third angle is about institutionalization and adaptation here it's about how far is there thinking in terms of actually succession models right so you had these projects you may have short term benefits from these projects but how far is the learning and the benefit then transferred to national governments or to various NGOs is there any handover in succession this was quite an important puzzle to look at so in terms of conceptualizing peace building legacy these were the various areas that I looked at the next bit is the case studies and I will quickly talk about the two case studies and not Macedonia you know those who are familiar with the Balkans will know that the issue is about intergroup conflict it's also about language equality and in this case the NGO that I work with the large NGO they were using peace education and media and theater as part of the fieldwork I get to go to really lovely places this is like over it by the way so I was working with these kindergarten the focus was an intercultural communication between Macedonians and Albanians and peace education is a really important going field of activity in terms of peace building and it was interesting to see what sort of norms were being transmitted through intercultural communication projects these kindergarten where you had Albanian teachers and you had Macedonian teachers and they were trying to transmit these languages to young children between three to six years of age so in deeply divided societies obviously language is a very important issue the other thing here is you know these kindergartens that I visited in Macedonia so there were not many but it was a very interesting model in terms of the normative push from the European Union on bilingual instruction on intercultural communication and the interesting bit is this mosaic model which is the kindergarten you know they're called mosaic kindergartens this has been adopted by the government at a particular time and this kind of nationalization or institutionalization of a peace building project is rare and in some ways peace education actually enabled this kind of institutionalization more than media projects which is what we'll see shortly but the mosaic model you know I don't want to transmit this idea that it was perfect there were many difficulties or funding difficulties when it was institutionalized you know a lot of the frills went because donors were paying more money but the government could not afford it and when the frills went you know it meant that the experience for children and their families was not quite the same in effect the kindergartens were very popular because they were the sort of best alternative in terms of preschool education not so much in terms of intercultural communications although the norms transmitted or being emphasized was to bring these two communities closer and to expose them to the values and the language you know to communities but in reality it was very practical reasons why should we enroll into these mosaic kindergartens so in just to summarize what did I find in Macedonia I found that the in terms of learning and reflection I want to start with that the institutional memory was very well preserved you know there was a lot of staff continuity alumni not quite they didn't quite follow up as much learning was quite weak because there was so much emphasis on projects and activities and often repetition of activities there was not enough inter-organizational learning with other organizations like UNICEF and Nansen dialogue center which were running similar intercultural communication projects but also not enough follow-up with alumni they started quite late in the life cycle of the mosaic projects and often the theory of change was not being revisited despite various evaluations asking for the fact that instead of individual children it was the family which needed to be the focus of these programs because the family and social capital elements were really important in the context of Macedonian society and therefore I found that geographic location pre-existing social ties between two groups the relationship between families was quite a powerful sort of determinant of how far these norms in terms of intercultural communication actually held and institutionalization have already mentioned that although it was institutionalized it was not a seamless process you know there were many difficulties with translating a model and often there was dilution in terms of quality and one of the things is that there was never any interrogation as to how far the normative portion intercultural communication and it was a very donor driven project but it was not really enough internal reflection or understanding that whether it resonated with society whether society was ready for this kind of you know closeness between the groups it was very superficial in terms of non-transmission and retention okay Sierra Leone this has been in Sinjo in Pujahun district I know Fudmi has done a lot of work in Sierra Leone the focus was on media programs on attitude change through radio and it's interesting because I've done so much work in West Africa and always I used to see these radio programs and how people used to listen to these programs when they were in the communities very little research however has gone into thinking about the long-term effects of community radio for example this was an interesting area to dig into and I found that very much media you know adopts a programming for change approach that I'm trying to change beliefs and attitudes through behavior change communication now these obviously are various levels of individuals groups and structural change but how far this acceptance or internalization or retention of these media content I think this was an important puzzle to pursue this is the timeline of the various radio programs that the studio was working with had run it was quite famous you know it had become a model in terms of various local community radio stations there's a lot more in the book and it's just so difficult to translate so many years of work but it was interesting because it gives us a focus on the various topics that were being discussed the norms that were being discussed in brief you know the things that I've found is that immediately after the war the programs resonated very much with the local context and in some ways the bigger lesson here is that after the war there's a greater scope it's a nebulous situation there's a greater scope for original authentic program as time goes by donor conditionality donor interest donor agenda become that much more structured and there is not enough scope to be authentic to the local needs and local norms this was very interesting finding and also in Sierra Leone there was a big focus on intergenerational issues you know because of the nature of the conflict but often these were exacerbated because of the norms around rights there was instrumental adoption of these norms on children's rights women's participation for example but the elders in a gerontocratic society were quite resistant to this change in power dynamics also in terms of institutionalization unlike in Macedonia with the peace education projects with media projects you know the norms were it was it was very difficult to track over the long term in terms of retention because of the dispersed nature of media you know you can have attitude surveys and things like that it was very difficult to look at the long term change the behavior change the other point was that often there was very little link with the government departments so institutionalization wasn't really built into the thinking of these programs the other thing is that there was a tendency to prolong country presence on part of the Sierra Leone country office and there's a big chapter on learning and reflection the planning exits early planning exits in a way that there's a succession plan that you know the national organizations taking over the world that is often quite effective over many years and we don't have that in place which means that all this work all this effort all this you know effort change and transmit norms and sensitize to various issues disappears and particularly ad hoc structures whether it's child welfare committees whether it's these women's groups there's no real thinking into livelihoods or employment generation that the national government continues after the IGUs exit and the other point is that often these ad hoc structures live or they're alive as long as the project funding is there and the moment the funding is withdrawn people just go back to doing their own thing or what they know so often there are missed opportunities along the way and I think it's important for us to reflect on these issues in terms of institutionalization in terms of learning and reflection so I have this big chapter of norm transmission and in in brief I think the issue of resonance the issue of how far local societies are willing and open to adopting some of these liberal norms or liberal remedies that have been attempted in Sierra Leone there was greater openness compared to Macedonia it was very much national push a political push to get into NATO and EU which is transpired in all these intercultural communication projects because these are conditions being set by external donors in Sierra Leone actually there was more instrumental adoption of norms norms that helped marginalized groups whether it's women whether it's youth whether it's children in terms of rights in terms of greater participation you know political participation accountability governance since it's a fascinating mosaic of how norms interacted with these programs and what was adopted and how resonance really mattered and created better retention finally I want to talk a little bit about institutionalization succession and learning and reflection I think having formal links with the national governments can really help various civil society organizations you know who are working in the peace building field and it creates a stronger legacy both during the lifetime of the project of these projects that they attend and also later and less is more and I think we need to remember that in our everyday that it's it's important to focus on a few things and do it well rather than stretch your you know interest into so many areas because there's no money to be chased which means that often you have these multiple years of programming in same in the same sort of focus area in Sierra Leone for example electoral violence and democratization this area was a great success and it was a great success because there were multiple years of you know effort being put into this so having these you know ad hoc programs which is last only nine to twelve months which where there's no follow-up where there's no consistency there's not you know it's like a drop in the ocean effect it does not result in strong legacies and also follow-up research and having the succession things in place follow-up research with beneficiaries trying to really understand how things changed and now there's actually a push within various organizations to do post exit studies and I think that's a really important thing to follow up with learning and reflection I think for various organizations which are doing piece building work actively archiving the institutional memory you know documenting the communications evaluative evidence um maintaining staff continuity I think is really important and continue to the programmatic focus planning exits early because there's invariably a you know tendency to prolong presence because there's money to be had from the donors that doesn't really work the local residents of various projects and finally I think learning is a condition of various you know accountability requirements of donors learning is a condition linked to monitoring and evaluation that is again a accountability requirement from for various species building projects but very rarely is it internally guided and I think for various piece building organizations practitioners learning should be a really internally guided and moral compass of what can we learn from the work that we're doing right and I think that is a really important area to focus on for people who want to go away and work in the piece building field and finally very few you know there was very limited evidence of revisiting the theories of change for these projects and making adjustments but it's really important if you want to leave a long-term legacy if you want to you know do something meaningful in terms of changing people's attitudes from violence to peace and that's where I leave it thank you so much for listening thank you very much brilliant thank you so much let me just first and foremost congratulate Sokania I know that indeed this has been a label of love for you you spent a lot of time actually putting you know reflecting both intellectually and practically on the experiences you had all through those years and then really also leveraging the research that you've done before I go further let me acknowledge the fact that we have quite a number of this of people in this room from the African leadership center not just staff or fellows who just who are quite recent here and who themselves have lived through war South Sudan I cannot acknowledge South Sudan in the room I don't know if any of the West Africans is here people from Zimbabwe as well and I I think it would be good to get the reflection on some of this some of you were quite young too when the wars in your country started and so it's part of the beauty of being in an academic environment where you see researcher practitioner networks try to reflect on the realities that you all went through so I want to acknowledge for that and it would be good to have your feedback in question time I think what Sokania's book has done and I've tried to go through in the have not done in depth reading since you left it for me two weeks ago but I managed to cover a couple of chapters that helped me in preparation for today and the number of points that I want to make about how in terms of how I reflect from my own experience in 2008 I think you begin with a narration of what you know of your time in Liberia in 2008 in 2008 I was just completing my own reflection my you know my learnings from of the UN mission in Sierra Leone and I see some of the you know some very interesting factors in the way that you know in some of the issues you engage in this book and so what I would like to do is offer some reflections because I now cast my mind back I was at the United Nations interestingly between 1999 and 2003 1999 was a very special moment in in the crisis in West Africa that's when we had the cross border impact of peacekeeping and the UN Security Council itself was reflecting iteratively on how to respond to those conflict environments in Liberia Sierra Leone later on Côte d'Ivoire Guinea-Bissau Guinea-Bissau even before Côte d'Ivoire and the question of young people has been a perennial issue and so the kind of lessons learning you've done here takes us full circle you've managed to close the circle in a way that you've brought us back you've taken us to the future of all of those things to actually truly reflect on what does this mean for how we think about peacebuilding today and actually by the legacies in terms of how we deal in real time during conflict with with the the question of either the involvement or the impact of those wars on young people and over time on what happens to that intergenerational relationship and of course what happens to the young who have grown right this is so first and foremost methodologically you you you know you define for us I think you grappled with the question of who actually counts as youth who's young who are you dealing with at that point in time it's exactly what we try to to deal with because as as we reflected on the immediate issues at the core of of peacebuilding at the time how we defined youth and you know determined whether or not we were successful or effective or not even on the ground by the way I worked in the office of the UN special representative of the secretary general for children affected by armed conflicts at the time and in terms of policy and advocacy it was really harrowing at times to reflect on exactly these questions and I can just now think back almost two decades I mean more than two decades afterwards to some of the things we got right or wrong and so if you just took a definition of international labour organization and said it's 15 to 24 or you took a definition of UNICEF even UNICEF there was a counterpart that only saw under 18s as children and over 18s as youth whether you talked about immediate intervention or the fact that you were trying to breach the gaps in demobilization this growing issue was a perennial problem if you didn't capture the 15 year olds and you offered a program you know and you didn't capture 15 to 18 17 year olds as adults as young adults as youth and you capture them as children you failed warfully because many remained you know arms bearing and the kind of educational provisions you made for them might impact them so we never really got certain things right on questions of the international criminal in the the statute of the international criminal court in Sierra Leone again who bore responsibility who didn't all of those things were you know things that affected that looking back you began to see the norms we set on the question of you know young people themselves those norms have impacted what we did and have had implications for legacy but I want to go back to the question of the templated approach and that is one of the things when I look now at the non UN actors especially the kinds of organizations and agencies and the programs that you were looking at it makes me wonder whether there were things that were templated even in non-governmental agencies within non-governmental agencies when you look at Macedonia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other places how easy is it to transfer those things and yet as I look at your own methodology you're careful the systematic way in which you look at all of this I think there's a lot of value in taking on the learnings from here and these learnings themselves and I don't know who you might have been dealing with at the United Nations the cross fertilization between non-governmental entities and the United Nations will become a big area of learning as we go along but I want to return to the evolution of youth involvement on these intergenerational questions when you when you begin to look and I reflect now seeing your work what happened to those young people who benefited from such projects compared to young people who were not defined as young as youth who didn't benefit from such projects can we see a particular pattern as we look at those lessons two decades later and then anecdotally if I think back to Sierra Leone which is where I was you know completing that study and where the work of our own office at the time where Sierra Leone was flagship for the work of that office at the time I can think of a certain number of young people who benefited from programs of non-governmental organizations or UN agencies and they themselves have become parts of peace building entities today running peace building programs either in the neighborhood or in Afghanistan in different places working for non-governmental organizations and you can compare them anecdotally to young people who were part who missed out of either DDR programs or education programs and have become lost somewhere in that limbo have you know have been in limbo for a long time and you actually cannot see the kind of contribution that they have made to society there is no systematic study of such things and perhaps Sukanya part of the part of the next generation of research that we need to do is to dig deep and begin to see these aspects but talking about intergenerational learning which I quite appreciate I think Sierra Leone itself offers a reflection about how young people having been through those programs or not begin to develop their own voice around this thing you call the instrumentalization of the new liberal norms that are deposited in in the peace building through the peace building missions and actually for good or bad you can look at how Sierra Leone has had successive elections adapting these norms you can look at Liberia how it has successfully adapted those norms you can see how South Sudan has not done well really it's struggling to adapt those norms and whether it will ever do so is another thing entirely the jury is out on the democratic republic of the Congo you can look at other places and begin to make those comparisons but what you begin to see is how youth voices in Sierra Leone for example the youth bulge was not it was not the place that you know had its youth bulge moment had not come as of the time that all of this was going on at this point now you now have the youth bulge Sierra Leone is actively undergoing a youth bulge in a sense but that youth voice drove a change of government a couple of elections ago and you can begin to see how in the area of music I love what you were saying I think is a talking dumb drum studios of the search for common ground you were talking about in Sierra Leone how community radio how music how youth culture began you know to really help us change that environment and I think you already referenced somebody I saw that you referenced the work of Ibrahim Abdullah Ismail Rashid those who actually worked actively to really begin to translate what it means to be youth and the voices of youth Abdullah's work initially on push push part to to destruction led us to understand really the youth culture dynamics in what was going on in Sierra Leone all of that has been transformed into something really really useful and I want to congratulate you on doing such a fantastic job documenting this systematically and giving us a framework within which we can begin to see peace building through the lens of legacy but legacy both in terms of the impact of the initiatives and projects that were that were run as part of the response to a problem a decade two decades if not three ago but also legacy in terms of the young people who evolve over time and grow to make impact or not and I think that is where you know we're beginning to take the peace building agenda to I want to thank you so much thank you thank you very very much to both of you we'll open up for four questions I will keep an eye out and if there are anyone on your online but if I can just perhaps if I may if I can start just abuse the privilege of chair of chairing the session just just one one two comments or questions really Sukanya one one was the the emphasis throughout on the need for strategic thinking I mean this is something which in one sense no one is going to disagree with and it's very very important and it clearly is something which has been missing and so many of these external interventions we've been engaged in but I'm trying to locate a little bit from your work where is the strategic thinking that needs to be done that you're thinking about is it within because your case study approach is through a single piece building organization so that's one thing but that is also the broader picture that really brings me to the other question I wanted to ask or just put to you really what I said I thought was really really interesting and attractive with this is that you say in spite of what we've heard about the problems of technocratic peace building without going into further definition you suggest there is immense potential even within that framework for transformative action but I wonder whether that needs to be qualified or are you qualifying you have two cases that is Sierra Leone in Macedonia are you still talking about cases where there is if not a deep and solid political settlement then at least a measure of acceptance about the future looking brighter than the recent past where the ambient levels of violence perhaps are relatively low and where the security dilemmas are less acute than there are elsewhere I suppose in other words I'm suggesting do your findings are they easily transferable applicable to parts of the democratic republic of Congo today or parts of southern Sudan and I just wonder I'm not saying there might well be but you see what I'm trying to get at because we are talking about the broader political picture and what we often say is that both peacekeeping and peace building is very difficult to do in a political vacuum and always will be but whether this suggests that you're somewhere along the way and then there is the potential for for maximizing it but you don't have to answer it straight away but I just wanted to plant that there and you can answer that as well okay opening up for other questions and a very good invitation from furniture colleagues on our african leadership program who wants to stop yes just get the microphone and it will and if you can introduce yourself that would be terrific thank you how are you my name is Lucy Mabihua I'm from Zimbabwe, Matepeleland my question that I would like to ask is on the conceptual framework that you are bringing forward for peace building I would like to ask the suitability of this framework as a model can we apply the framework are we saying is it a general framework that we can apply in all parts of the world to achieve this peace building is there room for the framework to work in Zimbabwe or DRC as it is working in other places where you've been doing your research thank you thank you do you want to have a go yeah I think I'm going to link up with the points that Matt has raised thank you so much that question it does make me reflect on some of these findings a bit more carefully the first thing you know the question about strategic thinking and in the way in which you know you can pitch it at various levels strategic strategic thinking within the UN for example you know the way they are funding through the big peace building fund all these various projects and now there's an emphasis on women peace and security on new peace and security very formulaic approaches to doing things within particular sectors so strategic thinking obviously in terms of the bigger picture of peace building those who are funding peace building because my reflection is through this single peace building organization is almost representative of the kind of work that various INGOs are doing in countries recovering from conflict so it's stereotypical in the way that peace building is done and therefore strategic thinking both in part on part of the United Nations and donors who are funding projects because the level at which I engage this is implementation who are the organizations that go about implementing peace building or doing peace building in the field and strategic thinking I meant in terms of these organizations but I think also links to donors and the funders of these projects because unless they have a certain strategy as to what they're going to fund how they're going to fund it what sort of mechanisms multi-year projects focusing on you know the same area for many years so that there is a long-term legacy I think strategic thinking both at that level and at the level of the various organizations which implement projects so those are the two levels I was thinking I hope that answers your question and then you said about transformation transformative action and whether you can have and that's your question as well you know can we apply this kind of a peace building legacy framework to any country right any country which is stable which has had conflict I think a political settlement question is really important one my kind of model will apply better to countries where there is a political settlement where there is a certain level of you know peace to keep and there is this real push towards transforming relationships whether it's intergroup relations or whether it's intergenerational relations so it would probably be way down the road in terms of DRC and South Sudan not quite yet because we don't have the stability in terms of peace building engagement but in terms of whether it would apply to Zimbabwe I think it's almost you know if national governments want to apply this kind of thinking it would work but it would mean that they are investing in livelihoods employment in all those areas which build peace regardless of whether there's active conflicts on them so even in countries which have had a long conflict and are stable both international organizations and national governments can apply a legacy lens to their work because there is not enough reflection even within national entities as to the work that is unparticularly for young people there's not enough institutionalization not enough learning and I think that's the value of this framework that it can be transferable not only to youth projects but to any other category of beneficiaries and the work that is being done with them no no I mean I think I think that's right but this is where actually there's a slight nuance between what organizations can do and what governments can do and there's one thing I didn't respond to extensively which is also what Sukanya mentions about education because over time this is one area where I think it is possible to have a framework that you know really intervenes in the area of education consistently over a long period of time even when conditions are not necessarily right for you to do this relationship the transforming of relations and that's an area that has not actually been sufficiently adopted because it's one thing for you to intervene and do so-called peace education it's not that it's another thing for you to intervene because there's a framework that you know you're you're introducing around not just changing mindsets around if you like the perspectives that you offer to young people in schools in different places the mosaic that you were talking about it could in the in an ideal situation help us from a very young age and take us that far what I see though and I think it it's important to put this on the table in education this is where there's a contradiction between what organizations are able to offer and what governments offer because in some of the very countries that we're talking about the door is shut completely for peace building education when a country tells you you cannot study history and you cannot study conflict or security as part of the curriculum in schools and this is what we've seen almost across the board I think there were no two exceptions so if you're from Nigeria you're from South Africa you're from the DRC or Sudan but you cannot study the very things that you have experienced over this period of time in order to learn lessons from it where it's room for organizations like this to intervene at all so organizations like this can shape curriculum and if governments just open the window for it or the international community you know allows this to to be carried out then you can begin to make impact but actually the door is shut when there's no room to intervene at all through curriculum Senya introduce yourself Senya so we know you but not everyone Hi everyone I am Senya Oksamwitna I'm a lecturer at the City University of London and I'm a visiting research fellow in conflict security and development research group so kind of first of all congratulations on the book and I'm going to ask a question about your cases so I can imagine that you haven't selected those cases on the basis of variation because you have compared different implementation processes in this two situations so I'm sympathetic to that at the same time I think there is a lot of interest in variation there is variation in terms of the sectors right you have early childhood education and community radio there is variation in terms of the type of conflict sort of low-level tensions conflict in Macedonia and the very brutal civil war in Sierra Leone there is regional variation you've mentioned that Macedonia could access EU financing and various integration instruments one in Sierra Leone I guess the Yuan was the major player and funder so what does this variation tell us about peace building in various contexts yeah go ahead Senya thank you so much I think in terms of variation partly methodologically I was quite tied into the longitudinal data that I was seeking to get access to and in having a more in-depth study I focused on a single organization's work over 15 years in each country which meant that clearly it will not apply you know in terms of it's not scientific in terms of the cases that I was tied to the data that I wanted to look at but actually in terms of variation now that you raise the question it's a really important thing to think about within these countries for example with education I did find that depending on the organization that was doing this kind of work for example in peace education there was not enough inter-organizational cooperation in a lot of competition rather for funds but often the learning strategies and that's one of the chapters in the book that the learning strategies between organizations can be very different I was actually working with the organization which had a very explicit commitment to learning which meant that at a micro level in terms of implementation in terms of their work with the government in terms of you know what they were doing from an evaluation standpoint this was far advanced compared to other organizations and even in terms of the national organizations there's often a complete lacunae of doing this kind of learning this is one area where I found that it depends very much on the type of organization doing but also the funds because the meta ethnography kind of brought to the fore the fact that different donors want to different things and often organizations are like clowns you know they're putting on different hats and doing all these different things without any thinking about the long-term effects which means that donors also have a really big say you know whether it's the EU whether it's the UN in terms of what is being implemented I have this example of HIV is the fact that in Sierra Leone less than 2% of the population was infected but this was a big push for donors and they wanted to put money into it similarly violent extremism you know recently there's been a lot of money from the UN going into country violent extremism and in countries in West Africa where this is not a problem in fact you know young people now find that you know if they start this some sort of jihadist movement they will get benefits in terms of being asked by the government or civil society to be rehabilitated and all of us have done work on ex-combat and reintegration we know very well that these kinds of programs the beneficiaries want to join because of the cash benefits or the programmatic benefits in terms of training or education or catch up vocational training or whatever and therefore yes variation in terms of the conditionalities being put forward by the various actors whether they are the donors the type of organizations this did come through and it's there in the book was yes go ahead you can introduce yourself if you're grateful thank you very much my name is Mirza I'm from Afghanistan and I'm really happy to see this event unfortunately in our country around 50 years the majority people who are fighting their teenager their the youngs because strategy academically and also practically different networks they they work on these youngs to be in the fight for money tickets my question is that those areas that the children and youngs they don't access to the radios and also to the academic or institutions or schools so what will be the future of it and do you think also we need peace political peace building work in the world because unfortunately in more areas we have political supporters for these kind but situations that in the country the worries for example in this country that the the security is not good politically there are the supporters to the situation we demand like this what shall we do or the peace building or message up or the peace building for those political leaders those political networks that they want to do something and they want to remain these youngs in the dark future thank you very much thank you so much for the question I think that's an important point you raise the fact that of access and it's something that I tackle in the book the fact that peace building programs have a finite reach particularly with the mosaic case study I demonstrate with statistics that you know with numbers that in the end it's maybe a thousand children or 1200 children over 15 years who've been able to access that model the mosaic intercultural education model so which means that other people are not accessing these norms so how can we really talk about you know transformation across society but there are multiplier effects in the sense that these families you know it's not just the children it's their families and through the children the families were also exposed to these norms so there are there is a certain element of multiple multiplier effects the other thing is there are parallel projects happening so if it's not mosaic the nansen dialogue center and other unicef and other organizations tend to target with similar programs and this has also happened in Sierra Leone every other country that we have had long-term liberal peace building so there is invariably an exposure to liberal norms particularly in these case studies you know the more post-cold war countries we've had really deep interventions so to speak whether it's in the Balkans or in West Africa so there is not a normative void there's obviously certain values which exist in society but the liberal values also are transmitted both through national non-governmental UN you know various actors working in tandem so there is invariably even if they are not actively accessing a project the norms exist and in terms of radio you know there are other you know social media for example there's so much research now and how its phones and social media and whatsapp and twitter which has become a big influencer even if radio is you know not being accessed so I think these are not normative voids that invariably these liberal norms even in Afghanistan women's empowerment women's rights you know is a great success story and it's acknowledged widely and that's because of the work being happening in tandem not by only one organization multiple organizations so that's one the second point is in terms of political peace building and I think this actually links to what Matt's was saying about political settlements the fact do you have a peace to keep do you have a national you know sort of settlement where there's stability and in the Sierra Leone case you know political mobilization into electoral violence is one of the key wins of peace building because every election we've seen a decline in terms of young people being thugs or you know being mobilized as as election mafia so to speak and that's because of the sensitization and the non-transmission around not to be engaged in electoral violence the democracy is not about you know mob violence it's about taking part in exercising your right so I think there are definite success stories which come through in the book and through this data and I hope I also did this can I add something there quickly it's there's a double-edged sword you know approach to to new liberal or even to say even the whole idea of liberalization politically because more often than not and let me talk about the African context I'm sure of this has been you refer you referenced that Sukanya it's been so instrumentalized that what it does is that it creates you know a group a generation of young people who begin to lack trust in a system and as a matter of fact I can give examples of you know several parts of West Africa including Nigeria that I'm very familiar with that this point that Sukanya makes about electoral violence reduction in electoral violence amongst young people it's it's not because they believe in those in the liberal norms the liberal order it's because they have become more self-interested that they will not die anymore for you know for politicians who behave in particular ways and I think that's where there is no peace building or global dialogue around the dismantling of the very norms or the instrumentalization of the norms itself and this is where I think what you started with Mats about you know the general complaints you know the plethora of you know rejection of of peace building you know of this global peace building approach that's actually the thing that we need to really deal with yes and then yeah go on my select maybe I'll take two questions and then we'll go ahead yeah hi I'm Michelle Hughes I'm a PhD candidate over at the LSE in law actually studying the intersection between international human rights and the art of war is practiced by western liberal democracies and over the last 40 years I've worked in about 24 different conflict countries including Liberia in 2008 so we may have crossed paths um I am really intrigued by your research on media programs in Sierra Leone this is one of my case studies focusing more on Afghanistan but on the larger issue generally and I wondered if in your research you found any correlation between media performance during the conflict and media performance during the peace and if that made a difference to the effectiveness of the media's message and related to that is how much donor capacity building do you think of professional media is required in order to help the media become a real instrument of peace building thank you and by the way I look forward to reading your book thank you I'll take a few more questions and you can just think about your answers I think there's someone behind yes yes go ahead sorry go ahead yeah thank you very much my name is Catherine Charles I'm from South Sudan in terms of programming and connecting it to your point of strategic thinking do you think that involving local NGOs to design program to design peace building program is important because one of the key things that where I'm coming from most local NGOs they are like a lock frame organization and they just wear the design of the peace building program it happens somewhere else and it doesn't resonate with the context and that's where the funding the competition aspect because everyone just want to take a box to do something not because it resonates with the context and then you mentioned something about how do we link it with the institution with the government institution again I will link it back as someone that is from civil society background in South Sudan at the moment the civic space kind of open in a very dynamic way whereby there's a lot of collaboration between the civil between the civil society and the government but then again it will it will come down to funding and then a donor will be more comfortable to find it in a particular aspect which is not really crucial at the time that the citizens really need so we ended up in a way that just taking a box rather than making any impact so yeah thank you I think why don't you why don't you answer those important questions and I'll take the other ones immediately after that and I know you have some from yeah excellent okay what did you answer that yes your question first thank you so much for that about media and peace building I think this is really an important area and probably there's already some writing now which engages directly with peace media in these two case studies I did not focus on comparing between what was happening in the conflict because radio was also used for example to disarm and demobilize and I do have these stories about how effective it was and the send you went in and you know they were talking to the warlords and the IUF and you know how that how that transpired in terms of helping people demobilize and gain their trust so that was the closest I went to in terms of how it was being used in the conflict towards the end of the conflict but during the peace building phase which is the focus that I have here the interesting elements which come out from the Sierra Leone case study I know you're looking at another case of Afghanistan but the interesting thing is that how the norms you know whether it's accountability whether it's government governance whether it's anti-corruption children's rights women's rights these were really defined for the country this links to your question on South Sudan that there was not really any reflection of what was required by local societies at that time it was about this top-down push that you know these themes people need to be sensitized there's this fantastic paper by Catherine Bolton who's at Notre Dame and she writes about you know sensitization and this entire thing about radio sensitization it plays out in terms of you know preaching in the end that you know people if they're told often enough don't do this don't do this don't do this is the way to behave they actually start believing that this is the way to behave and in terms of long-term impact capacity building actually is a big problem because community radio invariably is something which is locally financed you know it's very self-help kind of model when countries like Sierra Leone where people are struggling to get in a square meal a day still and things are really difficult it's it's amazing that every evaluation talks about the fact that community radio will not survive when these NGOs leave but they have and that is the big win in terms of you know local capacity that even with minimum resources that they are able to retain what is good and community radio is one of those powerful educational tools and also information tools reliable information I'm not saying that it's all rosy there are problems which I do highlight in the book but overall I think that you know in terms of capacity building donors don't do enough it's very short term and then they leave and then the media sector becomes quite corrupt and you know there's this I forget the term that I use there but in Sierra Leone there's this you know corruption of the media that the politicians will buy you know a more positive image for themselves buy you know small tokens of food and you know buying a meal or things like that for journalists so Gombo or something you call it it's there so that's one thing the other thing is about strategic thinking and involving local NGOs there is a whole lot of effort now and you know this entire local term in fact Roger McGinty good friend mentor writes so much and Oliver Richmond they they talk about the local term even Roger's new book on everyday peace for example cited in the UN General Assembly or something in the recent meetings is that there is a real recognition that of the power of the local there's real recognition but what I think is important is that there's also a certain element of ownership and commitment and part of national governments and I think that's the missing link because historically the way liberal peace building has played out is that they've always bypassed the national government tried to build civil society and given money directly to civil society to have these external norms being pushed into these countries but in weakening state you know involvement or not involving institutions national institutions government sufficiently has meant that succession and legacy is a problem there has to be you know that the strategic thinking lies in engaging with national institutions and creating that commitment early on the donor funding is not just you know we pay for things and have a nice time and that's it it's about that commitment that intention that we do this for so many years and then the government takes over and there's a certain space in terms of locally defining and nationally defining what we'll carry on after donors exist I think that is not sufficiently you know being engaged with and it's an important area of investment for donors and also for national governments because I think there's a tendency to have a great deal of what do you call it donor dependency Sierra Leone is a great case and South Sudan for many many years whether it's humanitarian aid or you know donor funding there's not enough national accountability for taking over and carrying on this work in a way which is sustainable I think that needs to be really sort of driven home thank you you already still have my question that was going to refer to everyday peace by Roger my jeans because I actually read it last month but there's like a big tension question that I think that your book reflects but it's not only by what you have told us but it's not only I think of you Rogers like the whole stream of studies after post-conflict that is this tension of criticizing was as was Matt saying at the beginning my name is Raul and PhD student there is a tension of the technocratic peace approach and at some point when I read Roger he's kind of he's pushing forward for this but he's cautious to say like this is a solution to the technocratic problem like yeah you can go to the local there's the ownership problem that we always see each each one of the cases and and I see by what you're presenting that you have this tension like you see the positive cases to see the successes but also do you see all the problems in the middle and there's like this one thing from the people that do conflict or peace research to really make something policy oriented and solve the world because we want it but at the same point we understand the limitations so my question is what is your view on technocratic peace building after being in check in these cases and you already do another cases like you're leaning towards optimistic you're living towards pessimistic is artists as as with the same Roger and I would say like this islands of peace in the middle of of so much things that you're that are going on thanks Raul um you want to take you want to answer it away I'll take the other to him yeah him and then um thank you very much I'm a Coyante seller for university quick questions to Kanya you've mentioned a couple of times they need to revisit the theories of change in your from your point of view how should they be revisited and do you want to read out that question we have from the thanks this is one from zoom um so to what extent can lessons from peace and security building in the developing world be applied to Ukraine great and I'll we'll do those and I'll come back to that we have a time for another round yeah good excellent um thanks Raul it's an interesting one that am I optimistic or pessimistic I think I'm trying to be pragmatic and Cedric DeConning for example he's written this excellent paper international affairs and adaptive peace building and one of the things that he refers to and a few others about pragmatic uh approaches to peace building I think that's my position what can we do with what exists because there's no point having this utopian view that you know things can be radically changed there is no radical change in this world it's gradual and there are many obstacles towards change and in that sense there are what I want highlight through this book is the opportunities that exist and I think Matt has raised this point already I'm not sure I did answer it but there are opportunities within technocratic peace building that the way we do peace building not all of it is rubbish there are huge positives short-term benefits you know if you go and speak to communities and I've been very fortunate to be able to work at the community level in many countries that there are huge benefits of peace building work but often the benefits are lost it's not the way we are doing it because of this drop in ocean effects because of not enough follow-up because of not enough sustained engagement in certain areas that if people perhaps tweak the way in which we do peace building even if it you know even if it is within the street jacket available peace building that we can have much more uh long-term change of transformation and and that that is the point I really want to highlight Emma's point about theory of change and this really directly engages with some of the evaluative data through the archival ethnography that I was doing you know various projects that you know multiple-year projects that they had whether it was radio whether it was peace education often the evaluation data actually was spot on in terms of picking up what the weaknesses were the lack of normal resonance in Macedonia right the need for capacity building with media the bigger questions that you arrive at 15 years later have actually been raised even two or three years into the life cycle of these projects which means that there is not enough internalization or action to make the changes that is required to various theories of change to various project design or programming design and therefore it's not that the you know the the evaluative existence evidence does not exist it it does exist and evaluators are often impartial and quite brutal in saying what needs to be changed but very rarely is that action the response in terms of you know we will make that change it's often like if it's too much work let's just forget about it and continue what we are doing and we have the donor money so let's just keep doing the other things that we need to do it's just busyness this everyday busyness of doing peace building and showing performance rather than actually taking a step back and thinking what do we need to fix why is this not really working I think that's not that's what I meant now in terms of Ukraine I am no specialist in Ukraine I do not want to open a kind of one but I think that's it's a different sort of conflict it's an interstate conflict it's an attack you know in terms of state sovereignty and some of the countries that I'm looking at very much are civil conflicts which are intergenerational intergroup you know relations need to be transformed because of the internal you know frictions and fractures so I think some of these lessons may not apply as closely can I can I be a little bit provocative on Ukraine and I think you're right some of these conflicts we're talking about are internal that became internationalized in different ways in the very way that Ukraine itself has become and I think Ukraine is suffering from exactly the same kind of challenge that we've seen in those internal contexts I remember in the case of Sierra Leone half a long time the RUF was seen as fundamentally evil right and in fact around some of our closed door meetings or in task force meetings the questions of the question of who are the good guys would arise okay but actually to the ordinary Sierra Leone and so the ordinary West Africans are suffered at the hands of these rebel groups at some point in time the debate was whether whether you should make peace whether actually it's about brokering peace if you removed morality from it and today we say Ukraine where the united nations is completely unable to broker peace because it's split between the notions of good or bad or they are on this side on the side of the other so in terms of the strategic approach to making peace and doing that on the basis of the so-called neutrality on behalf of the people it's just that the difference is that Ukraine and entire country and all its citizens are the you know the receiving end of a contested power dynamic in the same way that in Sierra Leone those ordinary citizens were the receiving end of a contested power dynamic internally um and I just think that the whole question of peace is so little researched that you know how to how to make it how to build it is not something that we have politically aligned ourselves around with you know by being neutral on behalf of people who suffer before talking about goodness or badness or whether people are one side or the other I just wanted to really reflect on it like that I thought that was a really challenging very good question very very good question but I don't think I can answer it either I just wanted to offer those thoughts yes go ahead congratulations again on the book and the hard work that you've done um I hope I can get a copy buy a copy so my you're very quick to upon the challenge from my to run away from the application applicability of your your theory your legacy in peace building in in South Sudan but I think South Sudan is an interesting um is an interesting focus especially for this because there was a settlement there was a political settlement there was independence there was celebration of that and there was a period before things reverted into or took a different shape and perhaps could it be that the lack of a succession plan the lack of you know figuring out who goes on to do what once all these peacekeepers who've been here for years leave because what your work has done simply means that if we're to focus on that then we probably will not have South Sudan happening again there would be countries that may have that political settlement but it could be fragile or there could be environments that are created to take people back and we're studying in in the msc global leadership and peace building that sometimes conflicts are actually meant not to end so that there could have been a reason that the conflict in South Sudan was beneficial to some people and continuing with peace building and state building went against the economic uh you know aspects of of what was happening in the state I wouldn't know but I think you shouldn't run away from South Sudan so quickly because there is there could be room to apply what you have learned through this period what you have learned through through this period and through all that work to certain situations and say how do we not get another South Sudan happening again that's that's a fantastic way to think about it and and thank you for you know sort of pushing me to think a bit harder actually the framework on intergenerational peace you know which is a project that I take up next year from April I've been really fortunate to get funding for it this is a very pertinent one for South Sudan because South Sudan has been such a long long conflict and there has not been enough generational turnover in terms of the political leadership and one of the projects that I take when I actually not run away from South Sudan I have it is a key study and something that I'm writing next the SPLMA and the dynamics of leadership turnover or the lack of it and also the legacies of a guerrilla movement now becoming a political party but the political party angle is completely underdeveloped and it has become this authoritarian set up a military rule so to speak which means that there are really you know in terms of South Sudan it's not so much just political settlement or the lack of it or a weak settlement I think it is actually the transformation of the SPLMA which is a problem and linking it somewhat to the relationship between civil and communities and the guerrilla movement because those legacies have continued in the post you know 2011 sort of period and this is a really important relationship to look at it's that peace the actors who can implement the peace the spoilers who can spoil the peace and in so many ways the government itself is a spoiler and a fragmented spoiler I think in South Sudan the legacy angle is slightly different it's about transformation of the guerrilla character of the SPLMA into a political entity which is trustworthy which engages with communities in the form of a state with a contract to deliver services and security I think that is a big problem rather than just thinking about you know peace building and what happens after. Did you get the last question I think so it's better be a good one. Thanks and thanks for the talk it's fascinating and I'll I'll get a copy and try and read through it so Peter I work at the foreign office on conflict I'm going to be cheeky and ask two small one and a big one so the small one was you mentioned something I think about norms being instrumentalized and I'd be interested to hear a little bit more about that and how they were instrumentalized I think by some of the actors on the ground and the second one as you mentioned there's a need more to work with national governments and of course speaking from the perspective of a donor we do pump billions into well not the UK as a international community billions into education programs delivering through governments but of course that comes from a very usually a very different funding stream and there's an education department and an education team and they fund global education funds like the girls education challenge fund education and emergencies and so on so if you were put in front of one of those teams and the and the question was they were saying we want a better program so that we can support peace building and given their priorities tend to be achieving scale and generally they won't touch curriculum because that's a sovereign issue what would you say their priorities should be and what what advice would you give them thank you Richard um now the first thing about norms being instrumentalized I think beneficiaries and I'm going back to the work that I've done in ex-combatant reintegration which in so many ways motivated this project beneficiaries in a country which is economically unstable where there are limited opportunities for work for decent work for livelihoods for sustainable livelihoods tend to look at peace building as you know a form of just that benefit so when you talk to communities it's often like it's not the nature of the program it's the benefits that come with the program which is more important and therefore often there is a certain buy-in to various projects not because they resonate with their own local values or the way they think for example you know women's empowerment and in parts of Sierra Leone women don't own land you know they can't stand in elections as chiefs and things like that so inherently the society does not agree with issues of empowerment but there's a certain buy-in from various sectors women because they want to have those access to those rights which traditionally they've not had and also national governments because you know they want to transform into these progressive governments that are you know willing to change things in terms of participation and representation so there's instrumentalization at various levels in terms of communities in terms of beneficiaries in terms of governments that's one thing second thing is about if I were consultant and you know I'm looking forward to the job buddy if I were consultant and for DFID or FCDO and they were asking me to talk to various teams working in education I think often there's and one of the points I think which FUNMI has raised about incoherence the drop in ocean effect the fact that these different programs don't talk to each other you might have a fantastic program being run by a local NGO or a national NGO or an international NGO doing similar sort of work but they have you know they just don't speak to each other in some ways academic department is also like that but the funny thing is that it's not just about scale curriculum it's about implementing for effect in a way that there is coordination between activities right so there's coordination between organizations for example that are working with girls education and organizations which are working with secondary education now how do you align those activities so that they kind of converge towards the same delivering the same effect I think that is a great weakness and anybody who's done fieldwork for many years in different countries would know that organizations are often duplicating effects you know that their programs are doing the same thing often in the same communities but they don't speak to each other and that is the basic you know requirement that we that we are aware you know that we acknowledge that there is value in the work being done by other organizations and that we can actually engage in a positive way and try to have that kind of strategic alignment that you know if you're doing women's education because education we are doing young people and actually we are trying to do the similar sort of things in terms of access or school dropout rates and things like that that's really important terrific well I think we are running out of time it's been a wonderful hour and a half really really enriching and lots of food for thought and it remains for me to first of all say that everyone is welcome to stay on a bit longer I think we have lots of wine to finish and a bit of food but above all to thank Sukarnya so much for coming along to share your thoughts with us I'm sure people will now buy a book and also of course the fund me for being so good at turning up giving us some very very good feedback on that I know what we know how busy you are so please join me everyone in thanking our speakers