Building peace begins with trust. Historically, local peacebuilders haven’t always been trusted by international peacebuilding organisations. Through our partnerships with local peacebuilders and local peacebuilding organisations, we are working to change this trend, for good. Our partnerships are trust-based and designed to make sure that as an international organisation, we shift as much power to local peacebuilders as possible. We do this by building partnerships based on shared principles of mutual accountability, flexibility, local leadership, and sustainability.
We weave these principles into how we end our projects and partnerships. This means passing on full ownership and leadership to our partners and their local communities.
During a crisis, local peacebuilders on the frontline are the first to respond. They play a vital role, leading and supporting their community until assistance arrives. But international funding often doesn’t give them room to be flexible in times of crisis. Instead, money is earmarked for specific purposes, like installing a water pump, or funding a workshop. This means local peacebuilders are denied the flexibility to spend that funding on disaster preparation, or community resilience. On top of that, local peacebuilders are expected to fill out long application forms in English, or spend hours writing up reports for donor organisations. We don’t think that’s right – it takes local peacebuilders away from their work and prevents them from preparing in the way they know is best for them.
With our partners’ input, we’ve developed ways to make international funding as flexible as possible, quickly available and with minimal paperwork and reporting.
Historically, peacebuilding missions in conflict-affected regions of the world have involved a Global North organisation sending people to a location for a short amount of time, they ‘build peace’, and then they leave. Local citizens and organisations, as well as conflict and peace researchers, have repeatedly stated this approach doesn’t work.
To be truly impactful, peacebuilding requires local ownership. Sustainable peace isn’t just about signing peace treaties and asking people to put down their weapons – although this is important. Sustainable peace encompasses every part of local life: from access to the essentials like water and healthcare, to building the means for a community to thrive. This means building schools and community centres, and creating jobs. We invest in sustainable peace that lasts for generations, by ensuring that local communities hold the power to collectively solve their own conflicts and preserve their peace.
Local peacebuilding has been invisible on the world stage for too long. Our sister platform, Peace Insight, makes the invisible work of local peacebuilders visible. Peace Insight maps local peacebuilding organisations and publishes articles from local peacebuilding correspondents across the globe. You can see stories from local peacebuilders and communities across our social media and website, and in our reports. We only share stories that have cleared an informed consent process with those that gift us their stories.
We aim to be as inclusive as possible in our research, striving to break the silos of Global North institutions. Although local peacebuilders have been doing incredible work for many years in their communities, it is very rarely documented or researched.
All our research is co-created and designed in partnership with local organisations. By collaborating with our partners and using indigenous research methods, we produce high quality data on the impact and value of locally-led peacebuilding. Forming the basis of our broader decolonizing efforts, we reflect and challenge ourselves on the assumptions we hold, reintegrating and embedding what we learn into our research practice to avoid repeating harmful patterns from the past.
In an effort to remove barriers to participation, we developed Platform4Dialogue and use translation software to open up participation across languages. While these approaches aren’t perfect, we constantly test, facilitate, and support research studies that are locally designed and led.
Governments and institutions have a huge impact on local peacebuilders through their funding, diplomacy, and security. With our partners, we speak truth to power to shift policies, practices, decision making power and resources to local peacebuilders.
We use our influence to create space for our partners to speak directly with policymakers, such as government, UN and EU officials, politicians and large INGOs, and encourage policymakers to work directly with local peacebuilding organisations. We also actively build or join coalitions, and take joint action such as signing open letters or organising working groups.
