How do we build peace in a world in crisis? Those who study or work for peace often frame what they do in normative terms, as working to resolve conflict or build peace. But what peace looks like has constantly evolved. As the field has expanded over the past 40 years, understandings of the challenges to peace have changed, and so too have the 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 inspired by Cold War era conflicts, for example. But more recently the pace of change and the interconnectedness or complexity of the challenges have caught the field off guard. While scholars in peace and conflict studies have started to address complexity, and there is now some engagement with the polycrisis, there is little clear discussion of how the field should be evolving in response to this challenge. We are as yet not clear what peace work must become in an age of polycrisis. 

Over the last 8 years, leading academics and international practitioners participated in 99 interviews examining how they perceive and understand future challenges to peace and what we must do to face those challenges. As this presentation will describe, collectively these interviewees have expressed a great amount of anxiety regarding the current state of the field and its preparedness to face the onrushing complex challenges of the polycrisis. This is paired with a worrying lack of coherence and clarity regarding the changes that are necessary in the field if it wants to retain some relevance in this new era. In a time of escalating crises, we must therefore ask, how can the field best respond to the challenges we now face?

About the speaker: Professor Gearoid Millar

Gearoid Millar is a Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, in the UK, where he also Coordinators both the MSc in Peace and Conflict Studies and the MSc in Policy Evaluation. His fieldwork research in West Africa has focused on examining the local experiences of international interventions for peace, justice, and development – primarily in Sierra Leone – and he has published widely about the complex and unpredictable interactions (characterised by Hybridity and Friction) between international peacebuilding interventions and the local communities and individuals who experience those interventions. His current research focuses on examining the emerging 21s Century Challenges to Peace and understanding how to reorient the field to best respond to those challenges. He has contributed widely to the field of Peace and Conflict studies over the past 15 years, with four books and more than two dozen contributions to key journals, such as the Journal of Peace Research, Cooperation and Conflict, International Peacekeeping, the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Third World Quarterly, Peacebuilding, and many others.

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Co-organizers

This event is co-organized with the Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding.