Adaptive Peacebuilding: A New Approach to Sustaining Peace in the 21st Century

This open-access book introduces adaptive peacebuilding as a new approach for sustaining peace in response to the urgent need to ameliorate existing methods of preventing and resolving contemporary violent armed conflicts. The book utilizes five case studies (Colombia, Mozambique, Palestine, Syria, and Timor-Leste) to comparatively examine whether context-specific and adaptive approaches are more effective than determined-designed approaches to ensuring sustained peace in contemporary conflict-affected societies.

The book also reflects on the ways in which China and Japan view and practice peacebuilding, focusing on how peacebuilders design, implement, and evaluate programs to sustain peace. It further contemplates how interactions between external and local actors have facilitated or hindered peacebuilding in each of the five case studies and the approaches by two countries, and how they have adapted to complexity and uncertainty.

This volume represents the final outcome of the JICA Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development project titled “Contextualizing International Cooperation for Sustaining Peace: Adaptive Peacebuilding Pathways.”