Cedric De Coning

• PhD in Applied Ethics, Dept of Philosophy, Stellenbosch University
• Professor at Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

This article analyzes the role that Ukrainian peacebuilders play in contributing to strengthening social cohesion in war-time Ukraine. It studies an initiative to facilitate dialogue between two jurisdictions of the Orthodox church to develop new insights into the role that dialogue facilitation and peace mediation can play as a form of internal pe...

Climate-related stressors like extreme weather events, in combination with factors such as increased global rivalry for natural resources and a changing global order, will exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, and drive compounding and cascading effects. Such developments may undermine the resilience of communities and institutions also in the Nordi...

Climate change is having profound effects on global security and peacebuilding efforts. While existing research has mainly focused on the link between climate change and conflict, it has largely overlooked the complex interplay between climate change, conflict-affected states and peacebuilding. Climate change exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in...

This special issue delves into the evolving nature of African-led Peace Support Operations and their development over the last two decades. The authors explore how states have improved their security and military capabilities to face emerging and existing threats. The papers in this issue illustrate how African-led operations have progressed and ho...

The African continent’s security landscape is constantly changing. Alongside this evolution, changes in the global order have emerged, a decline of multilateralism and an overreliance on security tools to defeat terrorism across Africa. In contrast, these challenges have allowed the African continent and its peace and security mechanisms under the...

Climate change is having alarming effects on societies and ecosystems. There is also growing evidence of its impacts on peace and conflict, which is reflected in discussions in the United Nations Security Council. The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) have analysed t...

Looking back over the past seventy-five years of UN peacekeeping, the most enduring question has been: Is peacekeeping effective? Historically, most peacekeeping operations have been. However, peacekeeping is currently suffering from a significant trust deficit. One important factor that differentiates contemporary peacekeeping operations with a st...

In the context of the poor performance of many existing approaches to peacebuilding, the aim of this volume is to explore alternatives that may be potentially more effective. One alternative that has emerged prominently in the critical peacebuilding literature—as discussed in the Introduction to this book—is context-specific approaches to peacebuil...

Several developments disrupted an initial period of relative calm in the early twenty-first century, including the effects of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, major shifts in the geopolitical power balance, significant advances in information technology, and the negative side-effects of globalization. All these trends, separately and even mor...

After several decades of liberal peacebuilding implementation and considering the outcome of Western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the ineffectiveness of liberal peacebuilding to prevent, manage, and resolve the major conflicts of the early 21st century is clear. In this edited volume, we have considered the effectiveness of contex...

SIPRI’s Environment of Peace initiative focuses on managing the risks that are created by two interwoven crises: the darkening security horizon and the immense pressures being placed on the natural world and the systems that support life on earth. Security Risks of Environmental Crises (part 2)—shows how combinations of environmental and security p...

Over the last two decades, climate security has become an increasingly salient policy agenda in international fora. Yet, despite a large body of research, the empirical links between climate-change and conflict remain highly uncertain. This paper contends that uncertainty around climate–conflict links should be understood as characteristic of compl...

This article contends that Ad-hoc Security Initiatives (ASI) have developed over the last decade in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin and represents a new form of African collective security mechanism. The G5 Sahel Force and the Multi-National Joint Task Force emerged from a context-specific need for small clusters of African states to respond collecti...

The environmental crisis is increasing risks to security and peace worldwide, notably in countries that are already fragile. Indicators of insecurity such as the number of conflicts, the number of hungry people and military expenditure are rising; so are indicators of environmental decline, climate change, biodiversity, pollution and other areas. I...

With more analysts, policymakers, and practitioners advocating for a new twenty-first-century approach to mediation, it is now increasingly recognized that old methods designed for inter-state disputes and subsequently adjusted to intra-state conflicts are insufficient to respond to today’s complex transnational armed conflicts. In this book, we ha...

This book is open access, it explores the strengths and limits of international mediation as a peacebuilding mechanism. Introduces adaptive mediation as an alternative approach for coping with the complexity of contemporary conflicts. Emphasises that effective and sustainable mediation needs to be framed in relation to local realities and dynamics.

This chapter introduces the Adaptive Mediation approach, explains its roots in the study of complex adaptive systems, and addresses some of its key principles and characteristics. Adaptive Mediation encourages a process whereby the content of agreements emerges from the interaction among the participants and where the emergent dynamics of the media...

Since the 1990s, mediation and conflict resolution have often been related to liberal peacebuilding interventions. A characteristic feature of this period is that the content of peace agreements typically reveals more about the liberal peace values of the mediators than they do about the values or context-specific interests of the parties to the co...

Many commentators predicted that the impact of COVID-19 on Africa, with its high levels of under-development and weak public health systems, will be particularly catastrophic. The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and economic sectors have exposed and compounded preexisting social, political, and environmental vulnerabilities, especiall...

Processes of post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation are partly about fostering stability and adaptive capacity across different social systems. Nevertheless, these processes have seldom been expressly discussed within a resilience framework. Similarly, although the goals of transitional justice – among them (re)establishing the r...

Processes of post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation are partly about fostering stability and adaptive capacity across different social systems. Nevertheless, these processes have seldom been expressly discussed within a resilience framework. Similarly, although the goals of transitional justice – among them (re)establishing the r...

Reversing the alarming trend of rising food insecurity requires transformations towards just, sustainable and healthy food systems with an explicit focus on the most vulnerable and fragile regions.

Complexity science provides us with a theoretical framework for understanding how complex social systems lapse into violent conflict, and how they can prevent, or recover from conflict. For a peace process to become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions need to emerge from within, i.e. from the culture, history and socio-economic context...

This article considers the future of UN peace operations through a complexity theory lens. In the short-term peacekeeping will have to adapt to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fall-out of the Trump presidency. In the medium-term peacekeeping will go through a phase of uncertainty and turbulence due to geopolitical power shifts in...

Vasu Gounden, Executive Director and Cedric de Coning, Senior Advisor at The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes in Durban, South Africa, explore the Future of Think Tanks and Policy Advice around the World.

We often hear it said that a particular conflict is complex or that conflict resolution and peacebuilding are a complex undertaking. Beyond this commonsense use of the term, complexity theory, applied to the social world, can offer insights about social behavior and relations that are highly relevant for peace and conflict studies. Complexity theor...

Complexity theory offers a theoretical framework for analysing how social systems prevent, manage and recover from violent conflict. Insights from complexity suggest that for a peace process to become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions need to emerge from within, i.e. from the culture, history and socio-economic context of the relevant...

Over the past decade the impact of climate change on people’s everyday lives have become tangible. Its effects have contributed to loss of human life, it has undermined livelihoods, destroyed infrastructure, harmed national economies and stressed state budgets. Across the globe, its impacts have contributed to widened gender inequalities in differe...

China’s new, assertive role in UN peacekeeping, especially in Africa, represents a significant shift in Beijing’s peace and security posture that is not yet fully reflected in official discourse and rhetoric, but that reflects China’s new confidence with its global power status. Every significant adaptation in its peacekeeping policy has reflected...

Cedric de Coning explores how complexity thinking can contribute to our understanding of how to create more inclusive peace processes, and how adaptive approaches enable local and external peacebuilders to apply new models of practice, experimentation and learning. These differ fundamentally from approaches where the role of peacebuilders is to imp...

Over the last decade and a half, Africa’s peace operations capacity has significantly increased. African states have deployed operations of their own and they now contribute half of all UN peacekeepers. The African Union (AU) and the UN have developed a strategic partnership that plays out at the political, policy, and operational levels, and refle...

Changes in the global order are contributing to a more pragmatic era of UN peace operations. Peace operations are likely to become less intrusive and more supportive of locally-led solutions. Three overarching themes are identified. First, the degree to which a peace operation contributes to strategic political coherence will become a key measure o...

This open access book explores how UN peace operations are adapting to four transformational trends in the changing global order: (1) the rebalancing of relations between states of the global North and the global South; (2) the rise of regional organisations as providers of peace; (3) the rise of violent extremism and fundamentalist non-state actor...

International peacebuilding is experiencing a pragmatic turn. The era of liberal idealism is waning, and in its place new approaches to peacebuilding are emerging. This article identifies one such emerging approach, gives it a name—adaptive peacebuilding—and explores what it may be able to offer peacebuilding once it is more fully developed. It bui...

While demand for international peacebuilding assistance increases around the world, the UN’s Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) remains a relatively weak player, for many reasons: its original design, uneasy relations between the Peacebuilding Commission and Security Council, turf battles within the UN system, and how UN peacebuilding is funded. This...

In the West, the rise of nationalist populism reached a tipping point in 2016 when it generated both the United Kingdom vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as President in the United States of America. In contrast, the BRICS have over this same period invested in strengthening their commitment to the United Nations, global governance a...

Over the last decade, setbacks in places like Burundi, Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen have undercut the credibility that peacebuilding enjoyed in the international system. These failures have combined with a push from rising powers against Western dominance to produce a turn to the Global South for more legitimate and effective responses to mass org...

The concluding chapter analyzes the peacebuilding concepts, policies, and practices of five key rising powers—Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey. It finds that these countries’ approaches share some key features but diverge in others. Rising powers have a broader concept of peacebuilding than most Western donor countries, but the ex...

he African Union (AU), European Union (EU), and United Nations (UN) are under increasing pressure to justify the effectiveness of the peace operations they deploy. Justifying this effectiveness requires precise assessments based on systematized and evidence-based data. Per now, however, this data is lacking, a gap the global research community coul...

When the United Nations (UN) Security Council needs to authorize a peace enforcement operation in Africa, its partner of choice is the African Union (AU). Africa has developed significant peace operations capacity over the past decade. In addition to deploying eight AU operations, Africa now contributes 50% of all UN peacekeepers. African stability...

‘UN Peacekeeping Doctrine in a New Era’ now available for free via http://rdcu.be/tk4Z until the end of August 2017. - This edited volume offers a thorough review of peacekeeping theory and reality in contemporary contexts, and aligns the two to help inform practice. Recent UN peacekeeping operations have challenged the traditional peacekeeping pri...

Over the last decade several setbacks in places like Burundi, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen, to name a few, have significantly eroded the prominence that peacebuilding enjoyed in the international system. The failure of peacebuilding to deliver sustained peace has combined with a push from rising powers against Western dominance, to produce a turn t...

This book covers the design, evaluation, and learning for international interventions aiming to promote peace. More specifically, it reconceptualises this space by critically analysing mainstream approaches – presenting both conceptual and empirical content. This volume offers a variety of original and insightful contributions to the debates grappl...

Since its establishment, the UN's Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) has been involved in peacebuilding processes in more than 20 countries. This edited volume takes stock of the overall impact of the PBA during its first decade in existence, and generates innovative recommendations for how the architecture can be modified and utilized to create more...

The military is inclined to isolation because its baseline culture is designed to protect its command, control and communication systems from external threats. In the peace operations context, however, it is vital that the security dimension is integrated into the larger political and social-development strategic framework that guides the overall p...

This article applies complexity theory to the peacebuilding field and finds that for a peace process to become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions need to emerge from within, i.e. informed by the local culture, history and socio-economic context. International peacebuilders can assist this process, but if they interfere too much they en...

Increasingly, African leaders have been making greater efforts to safeguard the peace and stability of their nations. With threats ranging from Islamist insurgencies to an Ebola pandemic, the realities of protecting their citizens within these complex conflict zones have revealed a widening divide between the theory and practice of peacekeeping in...

This chapter explores the implications of Complexity for peacebuilding. It introduces Complexity by looking at systems, non-linearity, and self-organisation. The chapter also touches on the ethics of applying Complexity to peacebuilding. For instance, unintended consequences are inevitable and must be anticipated, so steps should be taken to monito...

In this book we have explored an approach to peacebuilding and evaluation that builds on Complexity thinking and practice. The mainstream, ‘complicated systems’ ontology depicts a context in which parts of a society can be isolated and ‘fixed’ by altering a few aspects deemed problematic by an external analyst. This reductionist approach is one tha...

Periods of conflict erode trust between national and local authorities and the people they govern, a trust that needs to be re-established. As peace operations are undertaken by inter-governmental bodies that tend to be inherently state-centric, however, peace operations need to go beyond merely supporting the extension of state-authority and stren...

UN peacekeeping South Sudan

While demand for international peacebuilding assistance increases around the world, the UN’s Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) remains a largely ineffective and marginal player in the peacebuilding field. There are many reasons for the PBA’s shortcomings, including its original design, the Security Council’s uneasy relations with the Peacebuilding C...

The importance of regional approaches to peacebuilding is often recognized in policy documents and public statements, but rarely acted on.i Three considerations explain the relevance of regional approaches to peacebuilding, namely: (1) confl icts are rarely isolated within state borders, (2) those who are closer to the problem are often in a better...

Mali and Somalia have both suffered determined Islamist-inspired insurgencies, and in both African Union-led peace operations have been a central pillar in political and security stabilization efforts. Despite challenges in transferring lessons between unique situations, the AMISOM experience can offer some useful lessons for Mali. We have identifi...

a massive quantitative increase in the number of peacekeeping operations as well as a qualitative shift from military intervention toward state-and peacebuilding support. In their September 2010 submission to the Special Committee on Peacekeeping (the Committee of 34, or C-34), the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO) and Department of...

On a recent visit to Mogadishu I was again confronted with the tension between local ownership and international self-interest. On the one hand was the Somali President, who wanted to assert his sovereign authority and lead the peace process according to his vision for Somalia. On the other hand, there was a powerful but diverse international commu...

Rising powers and the future of peacekeeping and peacebuilding This report considers the influence of the rising powers on the governance of international peace and security, and especially United Nations (UN) peacekeeping and peacebuilding. It argues that the rising powers are committed to the reform of the global order, and that they are pursuing...

The timely deployment of suitably qualified civilian personnel is a challenge that none of the organizations that deploy peacekeepers has yet addressed. This challenge has floundered on the periphery of the peacekeeping debate for many years, but a 2010–11 UN civilian capacity review provides a unique opportunity to focus attention on the problem....

UN peacekeeping missions suffer from cumbersome recruitment processes, high vacancy rates and a shortage of civilian staff. This article explores the bottlenecks hampering the recruitment and deployment of trained personnel, especially civilians. Paradoxically, an increased number of trained personnel has not translated into higher deployment rates...

This article explores why international actors assign such high importance to coherence. It argues that the assumptions on which the principle of coherence is based are flawed, and that the empirical and theoretical evidence indicates that there is much less room for coherence than generally acknowledged in the policy debate. It recommends that the...

There is an assumption that we can enhance peacebuilding by improving the tools that we use for assessments, planning and evaluation. However, the focus on tools creates the impression that peacebuilding challenges are technical. Improving tools is not meaningless, but our preoccupation with tools has a negative effect when it becomes a front for a...

This article focuses on the role of the special representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) in the context of UN integrated missions. The article argues that the primary leadership function of the SRSG is to facilitate a process that generates and maintains strategic direction and operational coherence across the political, governance, developme...

The scale of contemporary United Nations (UN) and African Union (AU) peace operations in Africa represent a significant shift in the political will of the international community to invest in UN and African peace operations. A macro-pattern has developed where most European and American peace and stability operations are deployed in NATO or Europea...

This article analyses the coherence and coordination dilemma in peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction systems, with special reference to the United Nations' integrated approach concept. It argues that all peacebuilding agents are interdependent in that they cannot individually achieve the goal of the overall peacebuilding system. Pursuing...

Literature dealing with civil-military coordination (CIMIC) has mostly been concerned with the relationship between humanitarian actors and their military counterparts. In the United Nations (UN) peace operations context, however, the humanitarian-military interface is only one of several civil-military relationships. This paper is concerned with t...

Peacekeeping operations have unintended consequences - this fact has long been ignored by both practitioners and researchers. The deployment of a large number of soldiers, police officers and civilian personnel inevitably has various effects on the host society and economy, not all of which are in keeping with the peacekeeping mandate and intent or...