Peace Work Amid the Polycrisis: Reorienting the Field

Those who work for peace often frame what they do in normative terms, as working to resolve conflict or to build peace. But what peace looks like has constantly evolved. As the field has expanded, understandings of the challenges to peace have changed, and so too have the paradigms, approaches, and practices deployed within the field. The challenges of the post-9/11 period called forward theories and practices that differed markedly from those of post-Cold War conflicts, for example. But more recently the pace of change and the interconnected complex challenges of the polycrisis have caught the field off guard. During 99 interviews over the last 8 years, leading academics and international practitioners have expressed a great amount of anxiety regarding the current state of the field and its preparedness to face these many challenges. This is paired with a worrying lack of clarity regarding what the field needs to do today to face these rapidly evolving 21st Century challenges to peace. In a time of escalating crises, we must therefore ask, how can the field best respond to the challenges we now face? This paper provides some suggestions for how we can reorient the field for the challenges ahead.

Speaker: Gearoid Millar, Professor of Peace and conflict Studies, University of Aberdeen