The Future of Peacebuilding

Written by Ali Altiok, independent researcher on youth and peacebuilding & co-author of “We Are Here: an integrated approach to youth-inclusive peace processes”

Covid-19 pandemic is a new risk to human society. In the past few months human society was exposed to many numbers of (mis)perceptions, (mis)calculations and lies about the potential dangers of this “new” risk. In less than three months, the risks turned into a very real problem: a global catastrophe, which already took the lives of 170,000 people, according to current official numbers.

Many young peacebuilders have moved to action to save lives and slow and mitigate the spread of the virus. They raise awareness on the pandemic, tackling misinformation online, produce hand sanitizers, and help the elderly who isolate themselves in their homes. Though these life-saving immediate actions are extremely important in the short term, we as young peacebuilders must begin to think about the new landscape for peacebuilding, when Covid-19 will leave in its wake.

What should peacebuilders do?
Peacebuilding actors should address the underlying causes of current crisis. As we always do, we should first conduct our conflict analysis exercises, but this time at the global level. What are the root causes of the current crisis? Why has the world and peacebuilders failed to prevent the deadly pandemic? These questions are sufficient to critically analyze and understand the problem at hand.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a public health crisis that did not emerge in a vacuum. The coronavirus crisis is exacerbated by poorly funded public and social services, a trend of valuing money over human life for decades. We should also be straightforward to talk about the fact that this crisis “cannot be separated from a crisis of democratic values, a crisis of education, the climate crisis, and a crisis of politics and civic courage”. We know why and how conflicts and crisis escalate.

What else should peacebuilders do?
Peacebuilding actors should also collectively strategize to protect the freedom to build peace in the future. In many places across the world, governments are taking temporary, yet extraordinary measures to slow-down the spread of the virus. These measures limit freedoms to sustain public health. But as we know from the 19 years of Global War on Terror, measures taken to limit freedoms for the well-being of society persist or transform into new forms.

We, as peacebuilders, also know that the paradigm of counter-terrorism limited the space and opportunities to build peace at all levels. This means, when the curve is flattened, it highly likely that the measures taken by governments and international organizations won’t suddenly disappear. Tracking this trend in the early days of the crisis will be crucial for the future of peacebuilding.

More importantly, peacebuilders should also be a bit critical to ourselves and to the footprint of institutionalized peacebuilding. To economically survive in multiple chronic crises of modern life, many of us have been demonstrating how peacebuilding approaches contribute to the counter-terrorism objectives or trying to fix the deficiencies of counter-terrorism. As some national security experts already noted, we should also embrace the fact that the huge political and economic investments in counter-terrorism has been one of the main vehicles to defund public health sector and deprioritize the risk of a pandemic.

Future
Human society will of course survive and end the pandemic, but the future peacebuilding will only survive if peacebuilders start building peace between people and macro level systems. It is the time for peacebuilders to start (re)shaping and transforming economic and political systems that are hostile to ordinary people and their public health, climate, democracy, freedoms and peace. This is not an easy task, but it is not impossible, as long as we are able to imagine a radically peaceful world.