[Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding] Daniel Philpott, Gerard Powers - Strategies of Peace (2010, Oxford University Press) - libgen.lc (1)

AN OVERVIEW 33
Although the Colombian government’s goal of ending paramilitarism
through negotiation is laudable, strategic peacebuilding requires that we
place those negotiations in a context of wider transformation. The guidepost
necessarily begins with and returns to the people most affected by decades of
extreme abuses of human rights and the destruction of anything approximating
human security at the community level. Transformation asks the hard
questions of what kind of change is sought, for whom, and by whom? Processes
that purport to improve the lives of local communities without sufficient
engagement of their experience, without the provision of spaces to
acknowledge their voice and concerns will, in the end, create political compromises
and other outcomes that replicate new forms of structural violence
and social exclusion. Strategic peacebuilding requires approaches that enable
people who must live with the outcomes and decisions of negotiations to have
adequate and secure mechanisms to participate and influence the process
and the decisions.
It is no longer sufficient, that is, to fall back on the exclusive politics of old
in settings of protracted conflict that suggest the common good can be assured
by a small number of elite negotiators without meaningful participation of
those most affected. Strategic peacebuilding requires a capacity to envision and
creatively develop the mechanisms of public participation to which negotiators
are accountable. The most significant weakness of far too many peace processes
has been the gap between elite levels of decision making and the communities
that are the recipients and inheritors of those outcomes. To build
participation and voice that forges constructive change requires a far more strategic
approach, with peacebuilders striving to ensure that peace is established
via a reconstituted public space and new social contract.
With respect to the example of the Catholic Church in Colombia, consider
the variety and specificity of roles Church officials and members have been
asked to play. The key to their success as strategic peacebuilders lies in how
effectively these actors mobilize their innate and extraordinary vertical and
horizontal relationships across Colombian society to help forge new spaces of
participation, engagement, and support for those most excluded and affected
by the violence and to ensure public accountability for high-level decision makers.
The healing central to peacebuilding in our era is often the restoration of
voice and presence, and it depends on the creation of spaces that redefine relationships—spaces
configured by the key principles of participation and voice
for those most affected by the violence and accountability for those on all sides
who perpetrated the violence for decades.
Justice at the Core of Strategic Peacebuilding
In most settings, the effort to validate and empower local actors, even while
calling the global community to become a transparent and robust force for
peace, requires that strategic peacebuilders pay close and careful attention to
the demands of justice. Specifically, this often means considering the evidence