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So I have to say.

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Hello and welcome. My name is Liz Carmichael and I'm a co-convener of UX peace.

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I'm happy to welcome you to this rerecording of the opening talk at the annual conference of UX peace,

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the Oxford Network of Peace Studies, given in Oxford on Saturday the 18th of May, 2024.

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The conference theme is New Actors and the Changing Field in Peacemaking and Peacebuilding.

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During the opening session with the speakers in person,

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we had a problem with the recording and we are grateful to the two opening speakers for rerecording separately their talks.

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Just after the event. Welcome to this first talk by professor Roger McGinty, recorded on zoom with the added bonus of his PowerPoint presentation.

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Roger Mckinty is professor at the School of Government and International Affairs and director of the Durham Global Security Institute,

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both at Durham University. He is co-editor of the journal peacebuilding and co-founder of Everyday Peace Indicators.

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He works on the interface between bottom up and top down approaches to peace.

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Roger, thank you for being with us. And we welcome you to speak on limits and alternative approaches to peacemaking.

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Roger McGinty. Thank you lose. And thank you to everyone at Oxford Peace for organising this.

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And congratulations to OCS, PS for simply being there and talking about peace.

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Indeed it's important, I think, that we talk about peace in times of war.

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It's important that we talk about what peace might mean.

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There's a lot of talk about war at the moment.

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And in fact, some people say that we're in a 1930s moment, and I have some sympathy with that view.

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In fact, some people say that multilateralism is under immense stress and that there is a greater emphasis no UN security alliances, uncertainly.

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We see that with the expansion of NATO, we see the outbreak of wars, many of these wars with potential to become regional or indeed global wars.

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We see the rise of populist movements across Europe, central South America and elsewhere.

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We see rearmament campaigns.

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Indeed, recently, the Sipri figures have shown that there was a year on year 6.8 increase in global armed spending between 2022 and 2023.

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That meant that a total of $202,443 billion was spent on arms last year.

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In fact, the US government in 2022 spent $48 billion with Lockheed Martin, the arms manufacturer.

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That's almost the size of the entire UK defence budget.

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And in April of this year, the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, put the UK defence industry on what he called a war footing.

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But of course, there was another 1930s.

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There was the 1930s in which some brave people talked about peace.

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People like Vera Brittan or Victor Galanos or those involved in the Peace Pledge Union.

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Many of them had been scarred by their experiences of World War One, and they didn't want to see another global conflict.

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So it is important in times of flux to reflect and to look forward and to evaluate the role of peace in our time.

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And. In this talk, I want to consider alternatives to current approaches to peace,

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and I want to consider either tolerance or possibly lack of tolerance to those alternatives.

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So what are your limits in relation to peace?

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What are your red lines? In fact, do we have red lines?

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And do new actors and new approaches change fundamentally what we mean or might mean by peace?

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Let me. Whet your appetite for these red lines.

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These questions about alternatives to peace through an example.

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And it's a micro example that comes from the everyday peace indicators.

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And through those indicators, we ask community members to identify their own measures of peace.

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What does peace mean to them? So rather than relying on experts or scholars to define indicators of peace or change,

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we ask community members themselves to determine what peace might look like.

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So, for example, in Afghanistan, we have things like people having antennas, television antennas on rooftops.

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That means they can watch whatever they want without censorship or social control from the Taliban or fuel stations being open during the night.

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It's a sign of security. It's a sign that there is some form of peace, or perhaps female vaccinators coming to our village.

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It's a sign that females can work. Females can travel, but also that there is some form of public health at work.

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So we ask people what peace like means to them.

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And in Sri Lanka, the Everyday Peace team were working on the issue of reconciliation.

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And in a focus group involving Sinhalese people, Sinhalese or the majority in Sri Lanka, they ask what would peace mean in your life?

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In everyday life? And someone said, well, peace would mean that the Tamils sat at the back of the bus, that they knew their place.

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Well, this took us aback. Because.

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It reminded us of Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s where African-Americans had to sit at the back of the bus.

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It reminded us of racism. But troublingly this was racism or bigotry genuinely held.

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We were dumbfounded. We were uncomfortable.

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But actually, many of the things that are happening in relation to peace at the moment raise tricky ethical and practical problems.

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And I want to come on to some of those later. When we sketch the current.

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Seeing of peacebuilding the current landscape.

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In terms of peace, it might be worth thinking in terms of a ledger, in terms of deficits and surpluses.

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So let me begin with the deficit.

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And it's quite a list, for example.

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Political leaders in the West rarely talk about democracy or human rights anymore.

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When you think back to the early 2000s, you may or may not have an opinion on Tony Blair or Bill Clinton,

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but they actually did talk about human rights and democracy.

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It's worth noting that there are no new UN peacekeeping missions.

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We know demonstrably that peacekeeping works.

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Yet, for various reasons, the UN has not instituted any new peacekeeping missions in many years.

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In fact, two weeks ago, the UN Security Council voted to start withdrawing from Congo.

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There are few comprehensive peace accords anymore.

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Indeed, there are few. Peace processes.

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Comprehensive peace processes. Any more?

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We can say that the liberal international order is fragmenting.

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That. The rules based international order is under strain.

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Now, this is not to romanticise that international order.

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It caused many problems, but it did give some guide rails and protections.

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It did improve and save some lives.

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But that order is gone. The liberal piece is over and it's not coming back.

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We see the rise of authoritarian conflict management, in which there is no attempt at negotiated outcomes.

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And David Lewis, Claire Smith and many, many others have written very well on this.

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I'm talking about states like Israel or Saudi Arabia or Myanmar or Sri Lanka,

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in which it's demonstrable that there is little interest in negotiated outcomes in relation to conflict.

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Instead, there is the pursuit of military outcomes.

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We've also seen the securitisation of migration in many places in the United States, in North Africa, in parts of the Middle East and Europe.

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We see the return of very old technology, the technology of fences, the technology of wire fences.

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In an age of digital technology.

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The Europe that celebrated the pulling down of the Berlin Wall is the same Europe

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that has built nearly 2000km of anti-migrant fencing over the past few years.

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In fact, we see a 19th century technology coming back that technology of transportation.

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It used to be that. Convicts were transported to Australia and other far away territories.

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Now the UK is proposing to transport migrants to Rwanda, so this deficit list is pretty long.

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But perhaps what's most damning is that political leaders don't seem to have optimism in relation to peace.

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They don't seem to have what might might be called the vision thing.

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Instead, politics tends to be reactive, tends to be inward looking.

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And as I said, the liberal peace is over and it's not coming back.

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But let's look at the surplus side of the ledger on that.

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Actually, there's probably more peacebuilding and peacemaking activity going on than we might first anticipate.

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So, for example, actually there have been a large number of peace accords at the local level, amnesties and indeed Covid ceasefires.

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Much of this was unreported. Indeed, Christine Bell and her team at Edinburgh University found 101 Covid ceasefires.

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They also found 344 written local peace accords between 1990 and 2023.

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That's a lot of peacemaking activity, much of it unreported.

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We also need to pay attention to on the ground every day.

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Peace. My own research with others looking at the micro dynamics of peace in.

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Colombia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland has shown that there is a lot of on the ground peacemaking activity.

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In fact, if we look at this study, we can see that people are very good at avoidance there.

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They also have a wide repertoire of other activities such as negotiation, cooperation, monitoring, involvement in politics.

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And what this points to is actually the common sense of people.

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And if we look at the smaller of the pie charts, we can see that the majority of activities that people engage in can be classed as non escalation.

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And indeed there is a lot of de-escalation.

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And what this shows is that people are not engaging in escalatory activity.

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The downside of this is that conflicts are often stuck in a holding pattern.

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And therefore we have long lasting conflicts.

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But if there is a basic level of security.

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Then people and communities often find their own forms of tolerance.

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They find their own level, their own modus vivendi.

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I'm not romanticising this, but sometimes communities find their own peace.

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Also on the positive side of the ledger,

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we see immense and very brave work on unarmed civilian protection in places like Colombia or Kenya or Uganda, or the fringes of Mayan law.

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We also see inspiring transnational social movements.

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I'm thinking about activism on climate change, on the women, peace and security agenda,

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and indeed campus protests in relation to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

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And in fact, one of the hugely underreported stories of our time is just how peaceful those protests have been.

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Just how peaceful? Multiple dozens, probably hundreds of.

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Gaza related protests on university campuses have been peaceful.

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We also see the promise of peace tech, the ability and promise of technology in helping intergroup relations, pro-social and pro-peace relations.

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We've seen an alternative security review in the UK that worked parallel to drawing up, uh, official command paper.

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We saw activists and those interested stakeholders thinking, well, what would security look like if it put people at the centre,

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if it was conscious of human security, if it was conscious of the importance of ecological security.

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We've also seen an increased awareness of the links between humanitarianism, peacebuilding and development.

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With the United Nations.

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With the United Nations championing the issue of a triple nexus that tries to integrate approaches to all three.

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In fact, it's worth noting at a time when many leaders in the West are disavowing peace.

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The international architecture for peace has never been more sophisticated.

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It has never been in such a research based place.

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We've seen the.

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Increase development of an international peace architecture.

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We've seen the newly reformed UN Peacebuilding Commission and Peacebuilding Fund.

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We've seen the creation of UN mediation teams.

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We've seen peace being one of the SDGs.

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The Secretary-General has been pushing a sustainable peace agenda and also attempting

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to rework the seminal 1992 agenda for peace document into a new agenda for peace.

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And on top of that formal institutionalisation,

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we see an immense amount of activity and indeed experience in the third sector in terms of pro peace and pro civil civil society.

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So, so far I've been talking about a ledger, which is a bit binary, negative and positive, but there is a lot.

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That is ambiguous, that it's difficult to place in the ledger.

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There are a lot of issues that present us with ethical and practical challenges.

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Many of these are not new. They are instead perhaps newly visible or more visible.

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Certainly the peacemaking and peacebuilding landscape has become much more complex.

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As Mateo, Peter and others have argued. We see a fragmentation of the peacebuilding space.

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Western assumptions on peace are being challenged, and that poses questions for us.

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Just how comfortable are we with this?

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In fact, I struggle to come up with the right lexicon to describe the different approaches to peace the West,

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the global North, the global South, alternatives, non traditional approaches.

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None of these terms seem to adequately capture what we're trying to see at the moment.

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We see a masala of new actors and new approaches.

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We see a lot of flux at the moment.

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And all of this leads to fundamental question.

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Does this new or newly visible approach to peace mean that peace itself is changing?

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Peacemaking. Then we can see Omani mediators working in Yemen, or we see private peace entrepreneurs.

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We see, in a sense, self-appointed actors who are well connected, who are networked, trying to see if they can mediate.

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We see Chinese mediation in relation to to Iran and Saudi Arabia.

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China has been a major peacekeeping contributor over the past number of years, both in terms of personnel and resources.

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50,000 Chinese peacekeepers have served in 30 peacekeeping missions.

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In fact, in March 2024, there were all.

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The field. There were 27 from the United States.

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And if we remember back to June 2023, there was an African peacekeeping mission or an African peace mission to Ukraine and Russia.

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In fact, a few months before that, there had been a Chinese peace plan for Ukraine.

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And if you remember the media commentary in relation to the African peace Mission to Ukraine and Russia.

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It was very patronising. It was along the lines of these guys don't know what they're up to.

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These guys are out of their depth. They don't know the context.

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They are very insensitive. They're just interested in publicity.

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Good publicity at home. But hang on.

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If we remember the liberal peace interventions of the 1990s and the 2000s.

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The criticism. Of those interventions was exactly the same.

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That these interventions in the former Yugoslavia, in parts of West Africa and elsewhere were shallow,

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were transactional, were linked to development or extraction, that the interveners were insensitive to context.

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They weren't listening. So we all want to diversify peace.

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We all want to decolonise peace.

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And in fact, if we look at this word peace, it does not refuse prefix us.

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There are multiple ways we can describe this peace.

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But what are our limits? Do we have red lines in terms of what we would accept in terms of peace?

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For example, do we see gender inclusion as a red line or a universality of human rights?

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Do we see that as non negotiable?

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In many ways, these questions are not new. There has been a mixed economy of peacemaking in place for many years.

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This is an era of multi colorism.

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There is an uneasy competition between unilateral realism on one hand and the pragmatic multilateralism on the other.

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Yes, there are many difficult things to accept.

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Many challenges, like they're the nature of peace has always been contested, so I'm not sure that the territory we occupy is particularly new.

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What is new?

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I think for those challenge, those in the West or the global North is that peace is being decentralised from the West or the global North.

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And maybe. That is not a bad thing.

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So thank you for your patience and your attention.