Visit briefly, follow, or join our Conflict Frontiers Massive Open Online Seminar (MOOS) & Blog to explore and discuss strategies for more constructively addressing the many challenges of the large-scale, complex, intractable conflicts that threaten contemporary society.  You are invited to attend and contribute to the MOOS Discussions the first of which will focus on Peacebuilding in the Era of Trump.  How do we build peace and resolve conflict in the age of hyper-partisanship? 

Use this page to try out our comment / discussion system and post test comments.

We have two discussion questions that relate to this entire unit. The purpose of this unit is to look at the work of a number of our colleagues who have been working on developing a new systems and complexity-oriented paradigm for peacebuilding.  We do not have the time to explore all the ideas of each of these colleagues, nor have we included summaries of all of the people who have been working in similar areas.  So our two questions for you are:

(1) What other ideas from the people we have talked about have you found to be particularly useful in your work?  Put another way, what are their core ideas that have influenced the way you work or think about conflict problems?

(2) What other people should we include in this "literature review" of the "founders" of the complexity-oriented approach to peacebuilding?  What key ideas of theirs have you found particularly useful or influential?  Can you give us citations to sources that talk about ideas?

To Join the Discussion

In order to post a comment to this Discussion, you need to be "logged in" as a registered MOOS Participant.  For those who are not yet registered, but would like to be, our MOOS Discussion page explains the nature and purpose of the registration process.

We also ask everyone to keep our posting guidelines in mind:  All posts must be civil (no personal or group attacks, obcenity, profanity, no SHOUTING or incendiary comments), no commercial promotion, and no requests for personal assistance. In addition, posts must be proofread, clearly written, and on topic.

What ideas do you think need to be part of the new paradigm that takes us farther than herding cats or peacebuilding? And what do we need to remember to include from older paradigms?

In this video, Guy reviews a long series of paradigms that have dominated the peace and conflict field over the years, and suggests that we will be proposing a new one which we refer to as "massively parallel peacebuilding" though which we "cultivate peace" rather than "build it." ("Cultivating" assumes that peace is a characteristic of a complex system, whereas "building" is a term generally used for designed and thus complicated systems.)  

• If you agree with this conceptualization, that what ideas need to be part of such a paradigm?
• What elements of older paradigms do we need to retain?

• If you don't agree with the notion of massively parallel peacebuilding and/or cultivating peace, what new paradigm would you propose to better enable the field to deal with the many highly-intractable conflicts that seem to be proliferating? 

Please share your thoughts here! 

To Join the Discussion

In order to post a comment to this Discussion, you need to be "logged in" as a registered MOOS Participant.  For those who are not yet registered, but would like to be, our MOOS Discussion page explains the nature and purpose of the registration process.

We also ask everyone to keep our posting guidelines in mind:  All posts must be civil (no personal or group attacks, obcenity, profanity, no SHOUTING or incendiary comments), no commercial promotion, and no requests for personal assistance. In addition, posts must be proofread, clearly written, and on topic.