This article analyses Thailand's peace landscape using the 2023 Thai Peace Index (TPI), a composite index of 34 indicators across four dimensions: absence of physical violence, social security, respect for diversity, and equitable distribution of resources. Drawing on national and provincial data alongside qualitative fieldwork in a multiethnic community in Aranyaprathet, the study shows how structural inequalities, uneven development, and governance asymmetries are associated with subnational variations in peace. Although the overall score rose from 3.42 in 2021 to 3.43 in 2023, this aggregate stability masks substantial regional disparities, particularly in Northeastern and Southern border provinces. The qualitative findings illustrate how locally led, multicultural peacebuilding—rooted in shared cultural practices, intergroup dialogue, and safe deliberative spaces—can strengthen social cohesion in structurally disadvantaged settings. The results challenge narrow conceptions of peace as the absence of violence, underscoring the importance of distributive justice, recognition, and inclusive governance. The article concludes by proposing an integrated model linking subnational data systems with culturally grounded participatory processes and policies that reduce structural inequalities.
This study explores the everyday peace practices of migrant workers in South Korea as they navigate employer dependence and marginalisation in the workplace. Drawing on qualitative interviews, the analysis identifies two primary approaches: defensive coexistence, which prioritises self-protection and conflict avoidance, and reciprocal engagement, which seeks to foster collaborative relationships with local Koreans. These distinct strategies are underpinned by two mechanisms: strategic plurality, the blending of distinct practices that results in a plurality of everyday peace; and semiotic asymmetric invisibility, the use of inconspicuous actions to navigate majority power. Theoretically, the study reconceptualises plurality and invisibility as strategic instruments of agency rather than symptoms of fragmentation or mere resistance. By centring this perspective, the article demonstrates that migrant workers not only proactively negotiate their structural constraints but also foster peace within informal spaces.
This briefing examines how universities in conflict-affected Mindanao contribute to peacebuilding through everyday academic practice. It argues that universities function as embedded peace infrastructures, where peace is produced through institutional proximity, sustained social presence, and long-term relationships with conflict-affected communities. Drawing on reflexive insights from institutional engagement, the briefing shows how peace emerges through routine academic labor that blurs the boundaries between teaching, research, and community work. It highlights the institutional tensions faced by academics whose community engagement constrains conventional research productivity and reproduces structural inequalities in global knowledge production. The briefing concludes by reflecting on the implications of this model for peacebuilding policy, research ethics, and university governance, calling for greater recognition of public universities as central, yet under-acknowledged, actors in sustaining everyday peace in contexts of protracted conflict.
In late 2024, and within the span of nearly two weeks, the political landscape in Lebanon and Syria was dramatically transformed with the Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire agreement and the rapid collapse of the Assad regime in early December. New administrations were formed in both countries soon after, which in turn set expectations of improved relations between Lebanon and Syria. However, in the spring of 2025, clashes erupted on the porous Lebanese-Syrian border-a border that remains ambiguous and subject to demarcation due to decades of sour Lebanese-Syrian relations. The clashes were a symptom of a larger issue resultant from the short-sighted, highly securitized approach adopted by the now-deposed Assad regime that fomented skepticism and stoked tensions between the two states. This is further exacerbated by Israel's repeated aggressions against, incursions into, and occupation of territory in both countries. These dynamics continue to threaten the prospects of lasting peace in bilad al-Sham (commonly translated as "the Levant") and underscore the reality of the situation: two countries joined at the hip, long bound by a shared history, navigating their shared destinies in a post-Assad future. Moving forward, Lebanon and Syria must reset their relations and work together for regional peace and prosperity.
This study assessed the effects of unregulated artisanal gold mining on environmental security and environmental peacebuilding in the Mazowe District of Mashonaland Central Province, Zimbabwe. This was a qualitative study and had a sample of 75 participants. In-depth interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs), and observations were used to collect data. Key findings were that unregulated artisanal mining in the Mazowe area was fueling environmental insecurities. These insecurities manifested as social, political, and economic conflicts affecting communities. The environmental conflicts associated with unregulated artisanal mining in the district are fueled by many actors, including the political elites. The study concluded that these environmental impacts have both short-term and long-term implications for environmental security and environmental peacebuilding. The study recommends a participatory approach to addressing the environmental challenges and to adopt a systems approach that considers the broader political economy of artisanal mining in the district.
Despite widespread agreement on the interdependence of peace and development, the concept of peace-centered development, which places peace at the core of development policy and practice, remains underexplored and is rarely integrated with conflict transformation in practice. Using a multi-method qualitative approach that integrates critical literature review, in-depth country case studies and comparative analysis, we reveal why implementation of conflict transformation alone often falls short in fragile situations and how embedding it within broader development strategies can unlock simultaneous gains in peace and development. We uncover the value and practice of peace-centered development and propose a new framework for connecting conflict transformation with peace-centered development, providing insights to policymakers and practitioners working at the intersection of violence, poverty, and sustainable development.
Aceh is a culturally and politically unique province in Indonesia, distinguished by its special autonomy to implement Sharia Islam. After the prolonged conflict and the 2004 tsunami, international aid, primarily from UN agencies, Western states, and international NGOs, poured into Aceh. Among these programs was the Strengthening Access to Justice in Indonesia (SAJI), a program funded through the UNDP, which aimed to revitalize the Adat Justice court system and reform its implementation to empower women. While local women's rights activists and local government officials acknowledge the program's benefits, this study identifies several key barriers. Most notably, the replacement of Aceh customary law experts with Sharia law academics in the Majelis Adat Aceh (MAA) has confused the legal foundation of Adat Justice. Combined with other challenges, this shift has limited the program's ability to sustain gains in women's access to and participation in Adat Justice, particularly in decision-making roles.
Recent literature highlights the role of community participation in reconstruction for sustainable peacebuilding, yet studies show limited integration of community empowerment into theoretical frameworks. This study examines community-driven reconstruction (CDR) in rural Aden and urban Marib, Yemen, during liminal periods before stable peace. Using a grounded theory approach, this study analyses data from 40 semi-structured interviews across these two post-conflict contexts to address the research questions: How are local communities empowered to drive reconstruction in post-conflict settings? What do CDR efforts reveal, compared to top-down interventions, about community empowerment and development in wartime Yemen? What do these two case studies reveal, from a comparative perspective about empowerment, especially in a wartime context? Four conceptual categories emerged as key drivers of empowerment: indigenous knowledge, local governance, social acceptance and aligning personal and community interests as key drivers of empowerment. This model offers a framework for understanding how community-led physical reconstruction fosters social cohesion and sustainable recovery in post-conflict settings, offering strategies for empowerment in similar contexts.
As rates of conflict and environmental risk increase, peace agreements offer a unique occasion to reach accord on both fronts. A systematic review of peer-reviewed articles published in the last decade reveals that little research has been conducted on the presence of environmental provisions in peace agreements, and that such provisions, where they are mentioned in scholarly literature, are often vague and poorly implemented. As the environmental risks of both conflict and post-conflict prosperity are well documented, multi-level management structures for these risks formalized in peace agreements may be helpful in mitigating them. What role peace agreements currently play and may play in the future in establishing provisions to achieve this aim deserves further investigation. This review identifies key trends in the direct and tangentially related peer-reviewed journal articles on environmental provisions in peace agreements. The identified trends are then used to develop recommendations for future investigation in order to build the empirical evidence base and best practices for the inclusion of environmental provisions in formal peace agreements.
This study examined the dynamics of conflict between artisanal small-scale miners and local communities in Matobo District, Matabeleland South Province, Zimbabwe. It used a convergent mixed-methods approach. Data were collected through interviews, questionnaires, and observations. The findings revealed significant conflict between largely unregulated artisanal miners and residents in Matobo. Communities believe the miners are damaging the environment and creating security issues, and they are accused of theft, robbery, sexual assault, and other crimes. The miners contend they earn a decent living and support local livelihoods. This is supported by income data showing that small-scale miners earn substantially from mining activities. Another major source of conflict is the encroachment of miners into the Matobo Hills, a UNESCO World Heritage site of cultural and spiritual importance to the communities. The conflict is intensified by weak policy enforcement and corruption within law enforcement, particularly involving artisanal miners. The study concludes that the ongoing conflict reflects a struggle for survival among groups with competing interests. There is a need to improve policies on shared land use and promote peaceful coexistence among communities.
In conditions of humanitarian crises, self-recorded testimonies are recognized as valid narratives, empowering the voice of the colonized. The paper argues that these testimonies can be taken as speech acts that form a narrative in oral history. These testimonies aim at inducing an obligation of solidarity and change on the end of the hearer. Oral history in crises holds a unique ethical value, serving as a form of epistemic and discursive salvation for individuals and their communities. This paper examines the epistemic and discursive aspect of oral testimonies, in order to denote two different ethical challenges that give priority to the narrative of the colonizer over that of the colonized. These ethical challenges are based on the authoritative discourse's dehumanizing terminology that reduces the native's ethical subjectivity on the one hand and the distortion of narrator's uptake that gives power to the colonizer's narrative on the other hand. The analysis in this paper employs qualitative method in analyzing oral testimonies, conceptual critique and argumentation grounded in speech act theory, focusing on how illocutionary forces are shaped and distorted by ethical, discursive, and historical factors.
Contemporary peacebuilding is dominated by the liberal peace model, which assumes that democratic governance, rule of law, and market-based reforms universally promote peace. However, the liberal peace has not fared well in the global South, where colonial legacies influence the interaction of normative orders. Scholarly attention has thus turned to indigenous mechanisms, which work well within their own socio-cultural settings through their promotion of dialogue, compromise and group welfare. However, literature is thin on the interface of formal and informal mechanisms of peacebuilding in the south of the Sahara, especially their standardizing influence. Drawing on key informant interviews in Nigeria, South Africa and Somaliland, this article analyses these mechanisms, arguing that indigenous processes have come under the shadow of neoliberal human rights. It finds that poor management of legal pluralism hinders policy engagement with informal mechanisms and suggests a theoretical platform for harmonizing informal mechanisms with institutionalized frameworks.
The article examines the dynamics and consequences of violent conflict in eastern Ethiopia. Property rights, greed-grievance, and environmental scarcity theories were employed to explain the violence. Results from interviews and discussions indicate that land-use change, livestock raiding, and contention over regional administration border defined along ethnic lines are the key causes of the conflict. Manipulation by powerful political elites in the federal government in orchestrating inter-regional tension has sustained the violence. The conflict has generated social, economic, and environmental impacts. Attempts to resolve the conflict have undermined customary leaders trusted by community members. Thus, peacebuilding efforts should commence with identifying political elites manipulating relationships, undertaking political reform, and implementing transitional justice system. There is also a need for the federal and regional political institutions to engage trustworthy customary leaders in the peace process.
Scholarship on the digitalization of dialogue facilitation often defaults to binary comparisons between virtual and in-person modalities rather than underlying digital affordances. This tendency obscures how digital technologies operate under modalities, limiting theory and masking context-dependent variation. To address this problem, I analyzed how digital technology affordances shaped a Georgian-Abkhaz dialogue initiative that transitioned from in-person to virtual formats during the COVID-19 period. Using a deductive-inductive design, I first applied a framework to map digital affordances across modalities, then traced how shifts in perceived affordances characterized virtual facilitation post-transition. Findings based on 19 semi-structured interviews and project documentation indicated that, while digital affordances shaped both modalities, they enabled new functions such as message testing, emotion regulation, and counter-messaging during virtual facilitation. Correspondingly, digital affordances expanded facilitators' understanding of dialogue space, introduced new participatory dynamics, and alleviated concerns regarding narrative transformation. However, limitations around social proximity and digital infrastructure remained.
In postconflict Northern Ireland, religious leaders play a key role engaging with those on the political, economic, and social margins of civil society with whom state actors either cannot or will not engage with themselves. Using data from 26 interviews with senior religious leaders, diplomats, and politicians, this paper argues that through this engagement, religious leaders contribute to the peace process by (1) representing views of the marginalized, (2) holding power accountable, and (3) exemplifying five civil skills; namely, (a) principled leadership, (b) partnership, (c) pity, (d) maintaining privacy, and (e) engaging in persuasion. Knowledge of this new typology and of how religious leaders connect with the margins can enable more effective collaboration between secular and religious peacebuilders. It can also improve our understanding of how religious leaders conceive of their own role and how they navigate a postconflict environment, where disputes are mislabeled as primarily religious as opposed to political.
Conflicts, like the Dadiya-Kaltungo territorial dispute in Gombe State, Nigeria, hinder economic development and human security in Africa. Understanding youth attitudes toward this conflict is crucial, as they are the primary actors in the violence. This study focused on youths' perceptions of the conflict's legitimacy, necessity, and the influence of subjective norms (SNs). Using purposive sampling, 200 youths each from Dadiya and Kaltungo communities were selected. Data were gathered through structured questionnaires and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. The findings revealed that while perceptions of legitimacy and necessity had no significant influence, SNs played a major role in shaping youth attitudes. This suggests that social pressure and community expectations drive youth involvement more than personal beliefs. Since most youths do not view the conflict as legitimate or necessary, focused peace education and consistent community engagement can help manage and potentially resolve the conflict effectively.
Local civil society organizations (CSOs) play a vital yet underrecognized role in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) efforts. Traditionally limited to vocational training or dialogue facilitation, their potential as key actors in sustainable DDR programming is overlooked. This paper examines how CSOs in Tripoli, Lebanon, contributed to post-conflict reintegration following clashes between Sunni and Alawite groups from 2011 to 2014. Using social network analysis (SNA), it explores how CSOs build ties for effective DDR strategies. Findings show that CSOs' strong local embeddedness allows them to act as trusted brokers between ex-combatants across sectarian lines. Furthermore, SNA offers valuable tools to analyze these networks and assess program impact. The study concludes that CSO-led initiatives leveraging community trust and local social capital not only improve reintegration outcomes but also enhance prospects for long-term peace. It highlights the need to reconceptualize CSOs as central agents in DDR design and implementation.
The role of academics who remain professionally active in Myanmar is often overlooked compared to the role of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM). By focusing on how academics maintained academic communities and international connectivity, this research aims to explore how academics position themselves amidst political pressure. Two concepts employed as frameworks are liminal agency in peacebuilding and safe discursive space. To attain data on the position and practices of academic communities in Myanmar, a qualitative method is applied by conducting interviews, group discussions, and a 3-month direct and indirect observation. This research argues that academics can function as a liminal agency and create a safe space for peaceful communication, as findings show that, despite their uncritical stance, academics play the role of a liminal agency. This position allows peace communications to emerge in the unconventional and subtle form of academic discourse.
The Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, driven by systemic exclusion and intensified by the 2021 military coup, has defied conventional conflict resolution using peacebuilding approaches. This article argues for a shift toward an integrated Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus, operationalized through Track II diplomacy and humanitarian diplomacy, to bridge immediate protection needs with long-term and sustainable conflict transformation. Using a qualitative, interpretive design and comparative analysis of the Oslo and Aceh peace processes, the study identifies transferable mechanisms for Myanmar's multi-actor context. It proposes a pragmatic model linking informal dialogue, localized "access compacts," and incremental confidence-building measures to verifiable humanitarian outcomes. The model assigns complementary roles to ASEAN (regional facilitation), Canada (technical and legal leverage), and Qatar (mediation and convening), while embedding grassroots and faith-based actors for legitimacy and authenticity. By reframing peace intervention as a continuum, the article offers a roadmap for inclusive, adaptive strategies that advance humanitarian access and lay foundations for sustainable peace, where, like the Rohingyas, all displaced persons can return with safety and dignity.
