Somalia: Creating Space for Fresh Approaches to Peacebuilding

addressing terrorism: a theory of change approach
narratives. Among the intriguing and complex paradoxes we find in the comparative
literature of how peace processes initiate, is the interdependence of official and
unofficial processes. 16 Governmental leaders with highly visible public profiles can
rarely afford the image of direct interaction with those whom they have indicated
they will never talk. In many cases a combination of quiet, off record, and unofficial
explorations are happening simultaneously with public pronouncements that
indicate the contrary. These unofficial spaces, more often than not initiate with and
through people who have the connections, relationships of trust and understanding
of dialogue, but who are not formally or officially tied to any government.
This activity is highly relational. It requires years of commitment and conversation.
It often initiates with key second tier leadership in environments of extreme
distrust and potential violence. Emergent in this body of comparative literature is
the increased understanding that the shift from violence to stable peace requires
multiple layers of conversation at differing levels of leadership, the careful preparation
of process and the preparation to enter into dialogue. Also required is the
understanding of how prudent and painstaking development of early conversations
can move toward officially sanctioned processes of negotiation. Engagement
as a strategy suggests that this requires contact and conversation with a range of
leaders, and with a commitment to varied potential processes. Isolation, particularly
when designed as a blanket form of control diminishing any contact, has not
clearly articulated a theory of change of how movements espousing violence will
change, or how alternative leadership emerges without outside interaction and
encouragement.
Conclusion
This paper suggests that a more direct exploration of theories of change could
create a more effective understanding of how best to approach and encourage
constructive social change. The primary requirements are twofold: Ask proponents
to delineate their key theories of change in more specific ways and develop
a dialogue based on empirical evidence rather than ideological preference or
politically driven mandates. There may in fact be significant overlap and areas of
agreement that could, particularly when applied to concrete geographies, result in
far more effective and varied strategies and approaches.
I would make the case that isolation in the form of wide ranging terrorist lists
was driven by desire to control future acts of terrorism. But the approach has
little, if any, clear projections of a theory of change that addresses the complexity
around the different contexts where it has been applied. It seeks to control
violence in the short term but does not suggest how as strategy it contributes to
desired change in the mid to long-term. Engagement as an approach includes
concrete ideas about change over the mid and longer-term but does not have
within its purview specific strategies aimed at controlling or preventing a particular
act of terrorism in the short-term. Its purpose is not policing. Engagement
strategies seek to change the conditions from which violence emerges, to locate
and create the opportunities that make that change possible.
16 See Fisher, 2005 and Darby and
MacGinty, 2008.
17