Confronting War: Critical Lessons for Peace Practitioners
Mary B. Anderson and Lara Olson, with assistance from Kristin Doughty
January 2003
Following is the Introduction to Confronting War. The full text of this book is available in PDF.
Chapter I. Introduction
This book is about the effectiveness of peace practice.
This term refers to the range of activities that are undertaken by non-state groups explicitly to end violent conflict and establish the conditions for lasting peace.
Who does peace practice and what does it look like?
Since the end of the Cold War, civil society groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), agencies of the United Nations, and regional organizations have increasingly intervened in conflict areas. The end of superpower rivalry brought new possibilities for such actors to play a role in peacemaking. The goals are twofold: both to end war and to build just, sustainable societies that resolve differences nonviolently. Such efforts are undertaken in all stages of conflict, from situations of latent tension and threatened violence, to full-blown civil war, to unstable periods after peace agreements are reached.
This work is called, variously, conflict management, peacebuilding, conflict transformation, conflict resolution, conflict prevention, peacemaking, or reconciliation.
The range of programmatic efforts is wide. Agencies offer peace education programs, or training in conflict analysis, peace skills, or non-violent activism. They organize people-to-people exchanges or they develop programs to promote reconciliation through specially targeted reconstruction or economic development efforts. They facilitate unofficial negotiation channels among political leaders, or bring representatives of divided communities together for dialogue. They dispatch civilian peace monitors to conflict areas to publicize (and ideally prevent) abuses. They support the development of "peace media" stations to foster objective reporting or to counter pro-war propaganda. These are just a few of the approaches used.
Although these efforts often go unnoticed by the international press and academic programs focused on international politics, there is a great deal of such peace work being done by many people in many places. The people who do it are savvy, smart, committed, and sincere. They expend enormous energy and time.
Why Focus on Effectiveness?
These practitioners - the activists and agency staff who undertake such initiatives - want to be effective. At the same time, they are ambivalent about a focus on effectiveness. On one hand, they want to know the impacts of their efforts and, for this, they recognize the need for a system that enables them to assess effectiveness - their own and that of others. On the other hand, although they regularly make judgments about how well something is working, they are nervous about doing so because they are not sure what criteria to use for measuring outcomes.
Peace practitioners very often put off the question of effectiveness, claiming:
"It is too soon to know the impacts of what we are doing. Peace takes a long time and we cannot know in the short run what our true effectiveness is.""It is too complicated to assess outcomes. Peace requires that many people work at many levels in different ways and, with all this work, you cannot tell who is responsible for what."
"It is too hard to know impacts of peace work. So much of peace work involves intangibles - changing hearts, attitudes, etc. How can we possibly even know the extent or depth of such changes?"
"It really is not necessary to assess outcomes. We are called to be faithful, to do good, without regard for outcomes. We do what we do because we must do something. To do nothing would be worse."
"All of our good efforts must be adding up. With so much good stuff happening, the effects will become clear someday."
"Measuring effectiveness is a donor agenda. We should not be drawn into their need to quantify everything. They have to understand that the usual approaches to assessment are not appropriate for peace."
However, it is clear that not all good programs are peace programs, and not all peace programs are effective peace programs. In fact, practitioners discuss with impressive candor their own assessments of how effective their activities are.
From such self-evaluations, the record of peace work is, at best, mediocre. In recent workshops, most practitioners gave their own work an "A" (excellent) for effort but only a "C" (just passing) for results. Few felt that they had been effective enough. Many see opportunities where they could have achieved more; they want to improve the results of their hard work and commitment. They want to make a real and positive difference.
How can we understand these assessments and what do peace practitioners see as the reasons they have not had more substantial results? Some of the reasons given are:
"We are too small, our resources are too limited. With such small efforts, we cannot have a big impact.""Our donors make us work in projects. Peace is a process, not a set of activities. So long as we have to work in project cycles, we can never be as effective as we want to be."
"We do lots of good work, but it is only a small portion of what is needed for peace. What we do is dwarfed by the actions of states, and external events overwhelm our efforts. We cannot control the big geo-political forces and these can always undermine our progress. This does not mean our work is any less valuable."
"We cannot work any harder or longer. We are doing everything we can do now. Even if it is not enough, we simply cannot do more."
These are realities. Most peace programs are small, peace is complicated, many people do need to do many things, peace does take time, etc. Yet, from the vantage point of a broad overview of many activities over many locations over a long period of time, one overwhelming conclusion emerges:
All of the good peace work being done should be adding up to more than it is. The potential of these multiple efforts is not fully realized. Practitioners know that, so long as people continue to suffer the consequences of unresolved conflicts, there is urgency for everyone to do better.
So, in spite of the real limitations and constraints, the question of effectiveness is high on the agenda of peace practitioners. It is posed in several ways: How do we do what we do better, with more effect, with better effect? How do we know that the work we do for peace is worthwhile? What, in fact, are the results of our work for the people on whose behalf, or with whom, we work?
This book addresses these questions.