Discussion 2: Principles of Strategic Peacebuilding
The approaches, strategies, and concepts that you have considered throughout this course apply to intergroup conflict and peace both locally and worldwide. As you complete this course, you are asked to consider all of these approaches, strategies, and concepts. At the beginning of the course, you examined the role of needs and meeting them in resolving conflict. In ending the course, you again turn to needs as you learn about the peacebuilding concept of sustainability, which deals with meeting needs for decades and centuries to come. In order for peacebuilding strategies and approaches to have long-term effects, they must be sustainable. This means that a community must develop its own solutions and be able to maintain them long after peacebuilders have left. Your course text identifies 10 principles of strategic peacebuilding practice. The principles are most successful when they are incorporated into a comprehensive strategy to sustain peace.
To prepare for this Discussion:
- Review Chapter 11 in your course text, The Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding. Pay particular attention to the 10 principles of strategic peacebuilding practices.
- Review the concepts, strategies, and approaches presented throughout the course.
- Identify a conflict with which you are familiar or in which you have interest. It must be a situation in which violence occurred in the past but peace exists now.
- Select two concepts, strategies, or approaches you learned in the course that apply/applied to the conflict that you think were used or are evident in the details of the conflict itself and the peace that exists.
- Consider how one of the 10 principles of strategic peacebuilding practices would or has helped to sustain peace.
With these thoughts in mind:
Post a description of the conflict that you identified. Explain how two concepts, strategies, or approaches you learned about in the course apply/applied to the conflict. Explain how one of the 10 principles of strategic peacebuilding practices would or has helped to sustain peace.
