Better Evidence Resource Library

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The Better Evidence Project’s Resource Library in MARS provides access to a variety of practitioner and academic resources to improve the evidence available to donors, policy makers, practitioners, and scholars in the peacebuilding community. For more information on the Better Evidence Project and additional resources, please visit https://bep.carterschool.gmu.edu.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 115
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    The State of Peacebuilding in Africa: Lessons Learned for Policymakers and Practitioners
    (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2020-11) McNamee, Terence; Muyangwa, Monde
    This open access book on the state of peacebuilding in Africa brings together the work of distinguished scholars, practitioners, and decision makers to reflect on key experiences and lessons learned in peacebuilding in Africa over the past half century. Each chapter tackles three key questions: What changes have occurred in thinking and practice at the thematic or country level? What have been the key lessons learned (good and bad) and best practices to emerge from them? And what are the top policy options or recommendations you would put forward to policymakers and practitioners working on this aspect of peacebuilding? The core themes addressed by the contributors include conflict prevention, mediation, and management; post-conflict reconstruction, justice and Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration; the role of women, religion, humanitarianism, grassroots organizations, and early warning systems; and the impact of global, regional, and continental bodies. The book's thematic chapters are complemented by six country/region case studies: The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan/South Sudan, Mozambique and the Sahel/Mali. The findings in each chapter provide valuable insights for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars who are interested in identifying avenues for the promotion of peace and violence prevention.
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    Safe Havens Amidst the Jihadist Storm: How Leaders Spare Some Regions from Terrorist Violence in the Sahel
    (Better Evidence Project, Carter School, George Mason University, 2022-01) Bere, Mathieu
    This study identifies what has helped the people of Amataltal in Niger and Dori in Burkina Faso maintain a relatively satisfactory level of peace and security amidst the jihadist storm that has been sweeping across the Sahara-Sahel region since 2011. To that end, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 36 key local actors selected through purposeful sampling techniques, with the help of local partner organizations, in Amataltal, Agadez, and Niamey in Niger, and Dori in Burkina Faso during the summer of 2021. The respondents were from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, including men, women, and youth leaders. One of the major findings is that the relative peace and security enjoyed by Dori, Amataltal, and the larger Agadez region resulted from a set of initiatives taken by local actors who understood that peace cannot be obtained only through military means, but also requires local solutions, involving local leaders and the whole population, to satisfactorily address security, development, and governance issues. The peace activism of local leaders, the commitment of the population to peace and social cohesion, the establishment of local infrastructures for peace (especially local peace committees), the vocational training and provision of economic opportunities to youth, and a more visible, positive presence of the government, have made a critical difference in terms of peace and security between Dori, Amataltal, and Agadez, and other localities affected by jihadist terrorism in Niger and Burkina Faso. There have been some significant obstacles and challenges: the lack of adequate financial and logistical resources to conduct their activities; difficulties of communicating, traveling, and mobilizing people; and the difficult relationships that local civil society actors and international partners often had with government officials whenever they took a critical stance. This study calls attention to the fact that local people are not only recipients of peacebuilding. They are, and can be, change agents and key actors for violence prevention and peacebuilding in their societies.
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    Ceasefire Drafter’s Handbook: An Introduction and Template for Negotiators, Mediators, and Stakeholders
    (Public International Law & Policy Group, 2013-05)
    The Public International Law & Policy Group’s (PILPG) Ceasefire Drafter’s Handbook is a guide intended to effectively supplement the activities of negotiators and drafters of ceasefire agreements. This Handbook draws from PILPG’s experience in ceasefire negotiations, as well as state practice and comparative analysis of over 200 ceasefire agreements from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. This Handbook includes an Introduction to Ceasefires and an Annotated Ceasefire Template. The Introduction to Ceasefires provides information on the core elements of ceasefires, the effects of asymmetry on ceasefire agreements, the role of third parties, and the legality of ceasefire agreements. The Annotated Ceasefire Template describes core provisions and provides sample language for drafters to incorporate into ceasefire agreements. Although each template section offers drafters a guiding framework, it may be necessary to reshape the provisions to address the nuances of each situation.
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    Untangling Conflict: Local Peace Agreements in Contemporary Armed Violence
    (Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, 2020) Pospisil, Jan; Wise, Laura; Bell, Christine
    This article seeks to understand the proliferation of local and sub-national peace agreements negotiated and signed in recent years. While such agreements are not a new phenomenon, local negotiations in violent conflict seem to be becoming increasingly better documented and formalized. This development may be caused by the comparably easy availability of electronic means of documentation and communication, even in remote areas. Local peace processes and resultant agreements have also gained more attention from national, regional, and international actors, in part due to their increased visibility. Interest in local agreements is also driven by the changing dynamics of conflict and peace. Structural shifts at the international have often resulted in a decreasing likelihood of comprehensive peace processes at the national level. The model of the traditional ‘peace process’ at the national level assumes the existence of a state actor who is internationally recognized, and one (or more) armed opposition groups. Often, however, conflicts are more complex. Some conflicts may be understood as contests about the control of the central state and others evolve from a complex interrelation between the national level and a variety of localized conflict settings that are largely based on context-dependent fault lines. In other cases, local agreements seem to play an important role across diverse conflict, in ‘untangling’ forms of conflict, that often operate as complex local-national-transnational-international conflict systems. This report presents the finding of two workshops focused on local peace agreements, their negotiation, the actors involved, and their impact and modes of implementation. Compared to national-level agreements, local peace agreements are considerably shorter and issue-centered. They deal with a wide variety of contextualized topics around the predominant aim of managing local patterns of armed conflict and violence. In their variety, local peace agreements represent the diversity but also the splintered nature and patchiness of what is contemporary armed conflict. Key conclusions are that local peace agreements cannot succeed where negotiations at the national level fail. They can even weaken motivations and incentives for power-sharing deals and provide pathways for contested regimes to sustain their rule. Armed non-state actors engage in such processes based on their strategic political interests. As in peace negotiations at the national level, parties continue aiming to reach their goals through peace talks. The negotiation of local peace agreements will usually reconfigure power relationships and may also undermine and, in some instances, even disrupt ongoing armed conflicts in ways that build confidence for wider peacemaking efforts. Such agreements provide a glimpse into what might be local agendas for peace and the management of conflicts, local forms of deliberation over power-relations, and how civilian and military actors come to an agreement.
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    Civil Society in Conflict Transformation: Strengths and Limitations
    (Berghof Foundation, 2011-01) Fischer, Martina
    This book chapter focuses on the potential contribution that civil society actors can make to peacebuilding. There is also an examination of what types of activities international and transnational NGOs undertake in order to influence international politics in a way that contributes to coping with global challenges. The author explores key questions such as: What are the strengths and limitations of civil society actors? What types of activities do NGOs undertake? What problems and dilemmas are faced in the development of civil society in war-torn societies? What is the role and potential of (local) civil society actors in war-to-peace transitions and what problems and dilemmas stem from the development of civil society in war-torn societies? She uses the example of Bosnia-Herzegovina to explore the limitations of civil society's contributions to peacebuilding, and how civil society relates to state-building. Finally, the chapter addresses how such considerations impact theoretical conceptualizations of the term "civil society".
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    “Frameworkers” and “Circlers” – Exploring Assumptions in Impact Assessment
    (Berghof Foundation, 2011-01) Neufeldt, Reina C.
    This chapter explores two contending constituencies and their arguments about why and how to identify impact in peacebuilding initiatives in practice. The two constituencies, “frameworkers” and “circlers”, involve sets of people who blend across the lines of development and conflict transformation work and possess very different arguments about how to conceptualize and operationalize issues of impact and change in program design, monitoring and evaluation. The differences matter in a practical sense for workers in international and national NGOs because their views often clash during program design, monitoring and evaluation processes, and leave both sides dissatisfied. These differences also hinder people’s ability to talk clearly about impact and change, what matters, how people “know what they know” about impact and change and, therefore, how they do their peacebuilding work. The premise of the chapter is that by unmasking the conceptual debates, peacebuilders can improve their ability to speak about and achieve effectiveness and impact. After outlining the two basic constituencies, frameworkers and circlers, and a review of the current status of peacebuilding monitoring and evaluation, the author examines how tensions between the two approaches provide insights into the underlying issues that need to be addressed. The chapter concludes with examples of ways that peacebuilding or other social change-orientated programs have adapted to bridge the positions in practice and identify practices that can strengthen particular areas that are currently under-developed and can benefit program design.
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    Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Theory and Practice
    (Berghof Foundation, 2011-01) Fischer, Martina
    This article explores the concept of transitional justice and its role in debates on democratization, nation-building and state reconstruction and its relation to reconciliation, both of which have become increasingly popular. Many researchers and practitioners see reconciliation as a necessary requirement for lasting peace, assuming that once a top-down political settlement has been reached, a bottom-up process should take place, in which unresolved issues of the conflict will be handled in order to prevent questioning of the settlement and a return to violence. In this context, coming to terms with the past is considered a precondition for building peace and future relationships. This chapter reviews the debates on transitional justice and reconciliation in order to assess the practical approaches that stem from these concepts in terms of their relevance for conflict transformation and peacebuilding. It also analyzes the state of research on international criminal justice and truth commissions and highlights the strengths and limits of these approaches. The author also notes that the debates on transitional justice and reconciliation, although they overlap, are not identical, and she outlines the need to see reconciliation as a multi-level process alongside conflict transformation. The chapter concludes by highlighting diverse challenges for research and practice, including a need to focus on the interaction of different actors, levels and mechanisms and to listen to the voices of affected populations.
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    The Role of Development Aid in Conflict Transformation: Facilitating Empowerment Processes and Community Building
    (Berghof Foundation, 2004-08) Bigdon, Christine; Korf, Benedikt
    This article examines both the theoretical assumptions and expectations, as well as the practical experiences, of empowerment approaches within the field of development aid, with a particular focus their potential for conflict transformation. The authors build upon the recent discourse in development policy that discusses the extent to which development cooperation can effectively contribute towards crisis prevention and conflict transformation. It attempts to analyze and build from three inter-related approaches: The do-no-harm approach which primarily aims to avoid doing more harm than good, and is vitally concerned with the unintended negative impacts of development aid, which too often tends to aggravate conflict rather than contribute to its resolution; the local capacities for peace approach which seeks to identify potential entry points for conflict transformation through development aid, and recommends that external donor agencies should focus on supporting local capacities for peace; and the discourse on peace and conflict impact assessment approach which stresses the need for a thorough analysis of the conflict context. The article examines these approaches through the practical experience of traditional relief and development projects working on complex emergencies in the field of community development. The authors explore the nexus between conflict transformation on the one hand and participatory and empowerment approaches on the other. They critically assess the potential of common empowerment approaches within community building not only to avoid doing harm but also to make a substantive contribution to conflict transformation at the local level. The empirical base of the chapter lies within participatory research and in the experiences of bilateral and multilateral development cooperation in the war-torn areas of Sri Lanka. The authors explore some common participatory and empowerment approaches within the field of community development, as well as constraints, dilemmas and ambivalences for the facilitation of empowerment processes through development aid within complex emergencies. The authors conclude with future prospects on the potentials, constraints and ambivalence of empowerment approaches and recommend a more political role for development aid in complex emergencies as it engages in more inclusive community building through processes of empowerment and recognition
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    On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States: State Formation in the Context of ‘Fragility’
    (Berghof Foundation, 2008-10) Boege, Volker; Brown, Anne; Clements, Kevin; Nolan, Anna
    This article examines the rationale and underlying assumptions of the mainstream discourse on fragile states. The authors argue that the conventional perception of so-called fragile states as an obstacle to the maintenance of peace and development can be far too short-sighted, as is its corollary, the promotion of conventional state-building along the lines of the western OECD state model as the best means of sustainable development and peace within all societies. Too often, state fragility research and analysis as well as state-building policies are oriented towards the western-style Weberian/Westphalian state. Yet this form of statehood hardly exists in reality beyond the OECD world. Many of the countries in the ‘rest’ of the world are political entities that do not resemble the model western state. This article proposes that these states should not be considered from the perspective of being ‘not yet properly built’ or having ‘already failed again’. Rather than thinking in terms of fragile or failed states, it might be theoretically and practically more fruitful to think in terms of hybrid political orders. Such a re-conceptualization opens new options for conflict prevention and development, as well as for a new type of state-building. Drawing on the examples of East Timor, Bougainville and Somaliland, the report points out the shortcomings of external state-building, and presents some innovative approaches to state-building.
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    Fresh Insights on the Quantity and Quality of Women's Inclusion in Peace Processes
    (Crisis Management Initiative and The Graduate Institute Geneva, 2015-05) Paffenholz, Thania; Prentice, Antonia Potter; Buchanan, Cate
    This policy brief resulted from a meeting of policy analysts, practitioners, and academic involved in the women, peace and security agenda to review, analyze and frame key findings from research related to women's participation and gendered approaches to inclusive peace processes. The brief was intended to contribute to the UNSCR 1325 high-level review process. The focus is on understanding why there is a persistent lack of women's direct participation in peace processes and the connection to the political economy of power as well as ways technical packages for women's participation can be strengthened and increased. Mediators play a key role in increasing women's meaningful participation. In addition, the complexity of women's multiple identities and roles needs to be better reflected in peace process design. Interspersed in the brief are both examples of women's participation in peace processes as well as recommendations for ways to strengthen women's participation.
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    Evaluating Peacebuilding Activities in Settings of Conflict and Fragility: Improving Learning for Results
    (OECD Publishing, 2012) OECD
    Evaluating Peacebuilding Activities in Settings of Conflict and Fragility was developed by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to help improve program design and management and strengthen the use of evaluation in order to enhance the quality of conflict prevention and peacebuilding work. It seeks to guide policy makers and country partners, field and program officers, evaluators and other stakeholders engaged in settings of conflict and fragility by supporting a better, shared understanding of the role and utility of evaluations, outlining key dimensions of planning for them, setting them up, and carrying them out. The central principles and concepts include conflict sensitivity and the importance of understanding and testing underlying theories about what is being done and why. The report describes the convergence of the concepts of peacebuilding, statebuilding and conflict prevention and addresses the emerging international consensus that such contexts require specific, adapted approaches. It considers the principles for engagement in fragile states as the backdrop to evaluating such engagement and outlines the preconditions for evaluability, which should be handled by those designing and managing such programs. Such conditions include setting clear, measurable objectives for peace-related activities, collecting baselines data and monitoring activities. The report analyzes challenges of evaluating in fragile, conflicted-affected societies, the importance of understanding the conflict context; conflict sensitivity and theories of change; and examples of evaluations at work. The report concludes that actionable recommendations based on the conclusions should be presented as opportunities for learning and commissioning institutions should ensure systematic response to the findings. Such an approach will increase receptivity and the chances that findings will be fed back into program design and decision-making. In these ways, more and better evaluation will contribute to identifying strategies and programs that progress towards “peace writ large”.
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    Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict
    (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012) Anderson, Mary B.; Wallace, Marshall
    This book reports stories of existing capacities and resilience on the part of multiple communities—some quite sizable and significant—that manage to prevent violent conflict when all the incentives that surround them are to become involved, to fight. The stories of thirteen communities show that prevention of violent conflict is possible. Normal people living normal lives have the option to say no to war, and they take it. Normal leaders in systems that already exist can respond to and support their people in non-engagement, and they do. This kind of conflict prevention does not require special training, new leadership, or special funding. It occurs, repeatedly and around the world in different types of conflict. The communities described in this book were successful because they acted with intentionality and planning to set themselves apart from the agendas of the war, for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons. They did not move to avoid interaction with actors in the conflict nor attempt to be irrelevant to the battle. They were not hidden from view by remoteness or because of their insignificance in numbers. The alternate route they chose is not war-prevention, but it does constitute prevention of violent conflict in their contexts.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In West Africa With Legal Prosecutions
    (2020) Short, Elliot
    By removing powerful figures with a history of employing violence and armed conflict from the political environment, establishing a historical record of events leading up to and during the war, and bringing the perpetrators of war crimes to justice, a series of transitional justice mechanisms helped to prevent a conflict relapse in West Africa.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In Timor-Leste
    (2020) Short, Elliot
    A transitional international administration and a peacekeeping mission helped to prevent a conflict relapse in Timor-Leste and laid the foundations for an accountable state governed by a constitution and an elected government to be built.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In South Sudan
    (2021) Short, Elliot
    The IGAD has successfully prevented a conflict relapse in South Sudan by employing a range of monitoring mechanisms and facilitating ongoing dialogue between former belligerents.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In Sierra Leone
    (2020) Short, Elliot
    The United Nations Mission to Sierra Leone disarmed over 70,000 combatants, oversaw a peaceful election, and helped to strengthen the Sierra Leonean state, preventing a conflict relapse.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In Papua New Guinea (Bougainville)
    (2020) Short, Elliot
    A series of international peacekeeping missions helped to ensure Bougainville did not relapse into conflict and created a stable and secure environment for the new administration to govern the region.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In Nepal
    (2020) Short, Elliot
    The United Nations Mission in Nepal worked with local people and organisations to ensure that the peace process stayed on track while facilitating the Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration and military integration process, preventing a conflict relapse in Nepal.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In Mozambique (1992 – 1994)
    (2020) Short, Elliot
    The United Nations Operations in Mozambique helped to maintain peace and stability in extremely adverse conditions in post-war Mozambique.
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    Preventing A Conflict Relapse In Mozambique (2013 – 2018)
    (2020) Short, Elliot
    Talks mediated by the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the Government of Switzerland helped to prevent a conflict relapse in Mozambique more than two decades after the devastating civil war there had ended.