Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation [Hardcover]

This book covers the design, evaluation, and learning for international interventions aiming to promote peace. More specifically, it reconceptualises this space by critically analysing mainstream approaches  presenting both conceptual and empirical content. This volume offers a variety of original and insightful contributions to the debates grappling with the adoption of complexity thinking.

Insights from Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation addresses the core dilemma that practitioners have to confront: how to function in situations that are fast changing and complex, when equipped with tools designed for neither? How do we reconcile the tension between the use of linear causal logic and the dynamic political transitions that interventions are meant to assist?

Readers will be given a rare opportunity to superimpose the latest conceptual innovations with the latest case study applications and from a diverse spectrum of organisational vantage points. This provides the myriad practitioners and consultants in this space with invaluable insights as to how to improve their trade craft, while ensuring policy makers and the accompanying research/academic industry have clearer guidance and innovative thinking. This edited volume provides critically innovative offerings for the audiences that make up this broad areas practitioners, researchers/academics/educators, and consultants, as well as policy makers.

Acknowledgements.- List of Contributors.- List of Illustrations.- List of Abbreviations and Acronyms.- Introduction; Emery Brusset, Cedric de Coning, Bryn Hughes.- PART I: Insights from Complexity Thinking.- 1. Implications of Complexity for Peacebuilding Policies and Practices; Cedric de Coning.- 2. Thawing Ceteris Paribus: The Move to a Complex systems Lens; Bryn Hughes.- PART II: Insights from Complexity Practice.- 3. Avoiding Perplel³¼