Introduction

This chapter is being written at a time when our global social and economic systems are breaking down (Schwab 2019). Many of them were designed to concentrate power and benefits in a few hands while distributing the damage from wanton exploitation to the many. Over 4 billion poor people cannot use the law to improve their lives (WJP 2019). They only experience it as a punishment for something.

Democracy with all its virtues and deficits is not faring well. It is crumbling before our eyes, even in countries judged to be its exemplars and ferocious defenders. This is shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny (Repucci and Slipowitz 2021). The latest democracy index (Verschraegen and Schiltz 2007) found that just 8.4% of the world’s population live in a full democracy, while more than a third live under authoritarian rule.

Our climate is nearing multiple tip** points (Carrington 2021) with irreversible impacts. The earth is heating up everywhere, and temperatures are expected to rise over the 1.5°C threshold (UNFCCC 2021) by 2040, no matter what mitigation efforts are adopted now. Absent successful planetary climate action, global temperatures could increase by 4.4°C (Grunstein 2021) by the end of the century.

We also live in a time when wars and other forms of organized violence are becoming increasingly normalized as the first recourse, with diplomacy often taking a back seat. In our highly interconnected, complex, and unpredictable world, rising powers are challenging the international rules-based order they believe was designed by older powers for a different era. Fractious geopolitics and the ongoing war in Ukraine are affecting the proper functioning of multilateral security institutions such as the UN Security Council (Gowan 2021).

In addition to upending our sense of what is normal, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and its variants have amplified these global imbalances and challenged the reach and relevance of existing institutions and their hierarchical structures (Samur 2019). It has ushered in a paradigm shift in the way we conceive and enact leadership (Mahmoud 2021), particularly in times of crisis. The reader might then wonder what this cursory description of a world that seems to be unmoored has to do with building and sustaining peace. However, sustaining peace is not the sole preserve of experts, diplomats, or a transactional enterprise that can be pursued without due consideration of these global mega trends. Without peace, it will not be possible to foster the level of trust, cooperation, and solidarity needed to address these trends and their deleterious consequences. Nor is peace possible without justice, regenerative development (Gabel 2015), or shared security (AFSC 2015).

What this chapter argues is that the UN sustaining peace agenda (UN 2016), if properly framed, understood, and implemented in an integral manner, has the potential to serve, as an overarching, transdisciplinary framework for collective action, toward a more comprehensive and enduring peace. For this potential to be unleashed, the chapter calls for freeing the sustaining peace agenda from the international peacebuilding hegemonic templates that tie its fortunes to the presence or absence of violent conflict. Despite decades of research, there is still only a cursory understanding of peace as a complex phenomenon distinct from violent conflict. As a contribution to filling this gap, the paper will provide a brief overview of the dominant conceptual approaches to peace and the powerful assumptions that continue to inform the theory and practices of peacebuilding and sustaining peace.

Decoupling the sustaining of peace from peacebuilding would attenuate the conceptual muddle its binary relationship with conflict has created within and outside the UN. Such a separation would open the doors to innovative, empirically based approaches that broaden our understanding of peace, how it should be built, sustained and by whom (Mahmoud and Mbiatem 2021). This chapter examines some of these approaches with a particular focus on the emerging paradigm of adaptive peacebuilding (de Coning 2018). Tunisia, which is currently undergoing political turmoil and systemic breakdown, is explored as a case study where the application of such a paradigm by the UN system on the ground could have a positive impact.

The chapter finally argues that to fully unleash the potential of the sustaining peace agenda, the UN should deliberately promote integral leadership (Campbell 2021) that uncovers and harnesses endogenous, regenerative peace capacities from the inside out. Leveraging women’s leadership and unleashing the power of intergenerational co-leadership, among other key societal capacities, will be critical to the success of this endeavor. Although broad constellations of actors engage in peacebuilding/sustaining peace, this chapter, as intimated above, focuses mostly on interventions relevant to the UN system.

What Peace and Whose Peace Are We Talking About?

Before delving into what it would take to unleash the potential of the UN sustaining peace agenda, there is a need to first understand the various conceptual approaches to peace and examine how some of them circumscribe the meaning of “peace” in peacebuilding. Many of them have been devised to accommodate a system of largely implicit beliefs (Funk 2002) about how the world is ordered, how power is exercised, and how societies in or emerging from conflict should govern themselves. After all, the language and the terms we use, as argued later, influence the approaches to the challenges we face.

There is no one way to define peace (Hadžić 2018) and many ways to work for it. For decades, peace and conflict studies have devoted more attention to conflict than to peace (KIIPS 2021), with the meaning of one depending on how we understand the other. These studies tend to focus on how to prevent violence rather than on efforts needed to lay the foundations for self-sustainable peace. As a result, despite its centrality, peace remains under-conceptualized. One of the reasons for this is that peace is intangible, with nonlinear dynamical properties, and is often taken for granted until it is lost. Attempts to define peace tend to ascribe to it the qualities of an ideal end state, that is hard to achieve, when in fact it is an ongoing quest, constantly in the making, always arriving, and never arrives (Ricigliano 2012). In Paffenholtz’s words (2021), “the achievement of peace is unending, and societies can only ever reach an approximation of it. Moreover, it is the ever-changing pathway to peace that defines how societies understand the peace towards which they are striving.”

To make it more palpable, some scholars and practitioners have prefaced peace by an adjective focusing on either the character or the quality of peace. Positive and negative peace (Galtung and Fischer 2013), quality peace (Wallensteen 2015), constitutional and institutional peace (Richmond 2014), hybrid peace (Mac Ginty 2010), and adaptive peace are just a few examples among many (de Coning 2022).

In international relations, it is pointed out (Richmond 2020) that peace has rarely been approached as an area of study. Intellectual energy tends to be focused upon problem-solving and the perspective of achieving a minimalist version of peace in the short term, based on predetermined givens. Until recently, we knew very little about how peaceful societies sustain peace (Coleman and Fry 2021) simply because these societies are rarely studied, and also because humans tend to study the things they fear or that pose a threat to them: diseases, disasters, wars. When we manage to prevent them or address their devastating impact, the most that is achieved is half of the peace (Coleman 2018b). While such peace offers a modicum of security and stability, it is highly unstable and thus unsustainable.

Peace in International Peacebuilding

With respect to the international peacebuilding agenda, there are at least three dominant approaches (Funk 2002) that have shaped our understanding of how peace is conceived and built in conflict and post-conflict contexts. The first is premised on the exercise of coercive power (power politics), where war is erroneously conceived (Ferguson 2018) as part of human nature, and where peace is largely understood as the absence of war. Such peace is thought to be best secured through the forceful imposition of order, often referred to as peace through strength (Kiernan 1981). In some post-conflict contexts, this type of peace when secured through military power is often called victor’s peace, a highly reversible outcome usually requiring massive efforts to stabilize it. Such efforts are often led by international presences referred to as stabilization missions which tend to focus on maintaining security and promoting a particular type of state accompanied by externally driven societal engineering. The situation in Afghanistan (Chotiner 2021) and Iraq (Cordesman 2021) are testaments to the failure of pursuing such a securitized approach.

The second paradigm contends that peace is achieved through international law and institutions where governments pool their sovereignty in international institutions such as the UN and cooperate to build peace and address global problems for which the competitive framework of power politics is not suited. Such a cooperative, institutional approach (Richmond 2005) is guided by certain norms and values that have been collectively minted over the years, buttressed by the powerful, hegemonic assumption, similar to the one underpinning the earlier perspective, that a viable central state is the primary building block for building and sustaining peace, a highly questionable proposition (Balthasar 2017).

The third approach conceives of conflict as natural (UKEssays 2018) at all levels of human interaction, and peace is the result of skillfully applying various processes to prevent conflict from turning violent and when violence occurs, managing it through peaceful means. These processes often come under the rubrics of conflict resolution, state-building, peacebuilding, peacekee**, peacemaking, and so on. They often adopt various spatial orientations ranging from top-down, problem-solving approaches, to bottom-up, to hybrid approaches. Narrowly interpreted, these transactional processes take the form of time-bound, centrally coordinated packages of programmatic interventions designed to prevent conflict through fixing broken institutions and promoting electoral democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and market economy, among other liberal prescriptions. These prescriptions were judged to be relevant solely to unstable environments or where conflict is manifest or proximate.

It is these three approaches inspired by Western experiences (Funk 2002) that continue to shape UN peacebuilding, largely designed to achieve a version of peace acceptable to the hegemonic few (Richmond 2005). They are all wedded to the notion that if you understand the pathology of war or address the root causes of conflict, peace would ensue, despite studies pointing to the opposite (Diehl 2016) and to the faulty linear assumptions (Chandler 2013) informing such approaches. They also adhere to the theory that a strong centralized state is key for preventing conflict and establishing peace, broadly discounting the role and agency of individuals and societies as well as traditional governance structures in its construction and sustainability. Empirical research has shown (PSD 2019) that in sub-Saharan Africa, local chiefs, kings, and other forms of order beyond the state can play a powerful role in rendering services to citizen as well as preventing conflict and maintaining peace. Ghana (Meagher et al. 2014) and Malawi (Eggen 2011), among other countries, are excellent examples of what is called institutional hybridity where the traditional forms of governance have been integrated within the public administration of the state. This means that approaches aimed at increasing the capacity, authority, and legitimacy of national governments and excluding traditional governance structures may not yield the expected peace dividends (IPI 2017).

Even though, as discussed below, the relevance of these three Eurocentric and linear approaches has been seriously eroded over the past decade, they continue to influence international peacebuilding policies and practices, many of which feature prominently in the mandates of peacekee** operations, despite advice to the contrary as reflected in some of the recommendations contained in the 2015 report (UNSC 2015) of the High-level Panel on Peace Operations.

Peacebuilding Does Not Build Peace

In the face of the above shortcomings, many scholars have voiced critical views (Lemay-Hébert 2013) on liberal peacebuilding. They all have called for the need to reorient the peacebuilding discourse toward the promotion of more inclusive and contextualized systems of governance that account for local agency and decision-making. Some of them have argued that peacebuilding, as currently conceived and implemented by international actors, does not build peace (Denskus 2007). Declaring the end of the liberal world order, one study (Cassin and Zyla 2021) called for abandoning the linear conceptions of causality these peacebuilding methodologies espouse. They were deemed incongruent with the complex, relational, and systemic nature of conflict and peace. One scholar (Kuchling 2020) cautioned, however, that dispensing with liberal peacebuilding altogether is unwise at a time when authoritarianism and illiberal policies are on the rise, including in the West itself.

As a result of this critical debate, peace scholarship and practice have witnessed, over the past few years, the emergence of a number of alternative approaches for capturing, building, and sustaining peace. Some of them are hybrid (Uesugi et al. 2021) in the sense that they try to strike a balance between what the local contexts dictate and what international peacebuilding norms prescribe. Such an approach is not without its critics (Richmond 2012). Others, like adaptive peacebuilding, informed by empirical peace research, and by systems thinking and complexity theory, have called for an overhaul of peacebuilding altogether. They advance rather cogently the idea that peace has a better chance of enduring if it is built on the inherently resilient and self-organizing capacities (de Coning 2020) that societies exhibit when under stress.

Alternative Approaches for Capturing and Building Peace

What follows is an overview of some of these alternative approaches. The purpose of such an overview is to buttress the argument that the sustaining peace agenda will stand a better chance of living up to its full potential if a broadened understanding of the dynamics of enduring peace (Vallacher et al. 2013) is factored into the ways sustaining peace is pursued.

Tri-dimensional Framework for Capturing Peace

One alternative approach to capturing peace is contained in a recent study (Jarstad et al. 2019) in which the authors propose a framework which conceives of peace as a complex process of becoming rather than an end state, not unlike other scholars mentioned above. Under this framework, peace is captured through three lenses.

The first is that peace can be described as a situation or a condition in a society where people “enjoy security and where there are institutions and norms for managing conflicts without resorting to violence, that allows people to participate on an equal and just basis and exert influence in decision-making” (Jarstad et al. 2019, 6). The second analyzes peace in terms of the relationships between actors or groups in a particular context. It is based on the recognition “that societies are made up of a web of relationships, and that each one of these relationships can be studied in terms of their peace characteristics” (Jarstad et al. 2019, 10). The third strand of the framework takes an ideational approach to peace—ideas about what peace tends to shape policy, build institutions, and inform political decision-making. “An ideational approach to peace can also critically examine how the concept of peace is employed as a political tool to legitimize certain agendas, pursue particular forms of change or stability, and reshape or reify existing relations of power” (Jarstad et al. 2019, 13).

Such a tripartite approach—situational, relational, and ideational—is meant to usher in a more holistic understanding of how peace manifests, is experienced and understood and how the complexity of the phenomenon can be more adequately captured.

Disobedient Peace

Another alternative conceptual approach to peace that has witnessed a robust revival in the wake of the recent global protest movement (CEIP 2021) is what some call nonviolence through willpower (Funk 2002). The nonviolent (which does not mean passivity) paradigm posits that genuine peace can only be attained through peaceful means (USIP 2021). Violence undermines communities and sows the seeds of their destruction. In some contexts, such an approach is called disobedient peace (PSD 2020a), a form of civil disobedience (Lefkowitz 2012) engaged in noncooperation with an inhumane social order. Its proponents wish to reappropriate the concept of peace as a viable process for nonviolent societal change toward justice and equality and away from violence and militarism. In their views, acts of disobedience, defiance, and noncooperation can build peace by calling attention to injustice and inhumane social order. Studies (Bartleby Research 2021) focusing on nonviolent civil disobedience or disobedient peace argue that civil disobedience acts as a force for evolutionary change, to preempt a revolution. It is an internal “safety valve” that serves as a stabilizing mechanism when society is railing against injustice and experiencing a boiling point, or a “pressure cooker” situation. It is this societal, peaceful, self-regulating, corrective mechanism that Cedric de Coning, in his adaptive peacebuilding framework (2018), enjoins peacebuilders to uncover and strengthen (see below).

In Sudan, the sustained 2019 nation-wide civil disobedience campaign was credited for the relatively peaceful post-authoritarian transition (Zunes 2020) that the country is currently experiencing, despite challenges (Zaidan 2021), and how women leaders played a critical role (Hagenah 2019). However, it is possible to argue that in the case of Tunisia (presented below), it is this very “disobedient peace” waged in the summer of 2021 and largely led by young people that the president of Tunisia captured to peacefully pull the country back from the edge of the precipice. A move that is not without its critics.

Ecological Peace

As alluded to in the introduction, climate change and ecological collapse (IEP 2020b) are becoming devastatingly evident by the day. They are exacerbating inequalities, creating tensions, and shifting power balances between and within states and transforming humans and the earth they inhabit into endangered species (Simpson 2017). Several studies have called for exploring environmental opportunities for building and sustaining peace (Krampe 2019), through reenvisioning climate action (Wong et al. 2020) and taking steps to make peace with nature (UNEP 2021) that combine efforts to build peace with ecological regenerative strategies (Gomes 2018).

Others echoing the call have advocated moving from the current, individualistic, scarcity-conflict paradigm to one of cooperative resource management and, ultimately, toward peace ecology (Amster 2015). In this connection, the example often cited is EcoPeace (1994), an initiative through which Jordan, Palestine, and Israel, otherwise divided along political and religious lines, found themselves united in the face of a common environmental risk: water scarcity. The EcoPeace initiative aims to address the alarmingly shrinking levels of water in the lower Jordan River and the Dead Sea. The urgency of saving this shared environmental heritage enabled them to rise above what divides them and co-develop regenerative pathways to environmental peace.

Peace as a Sustainable Development Goal

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), unlike the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), are to be pursued by developed, develo**, and least developed countries alike. Among the 17 goals, SDG 16 in particular aims “to promote, peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” Because of its universal character, this goal, according to Arifeen and Semul (2019), acknowledges that peace is no longer solely relevant to unstable environments. Peace should be viewed as a necessity for all societies suffering from deficits in justice, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.

Yet the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development nowhere explicitly mentions “peacebuilding” as a means to achieve peace-related development targets for all societies. This is because, the authors note, peacebuilding conjures up a treatment reserved for fixing non-Western, war-torn societies, judged unsuitable for seemingly peaceful societies. Because of the changing nature of violent conflict, Western countries, including the illiberal democracies, also suffer from racial, ethnic, and religious strife; rising populism; and their own home-grown violent extremism. Therefore, “failed and fragile states located in the develo** South, are not the only threat to global peace.”

For many member-states fearful of the politicization and securitization of the SDGs, the above analysis is aspirational and will not be translated into policy anytime soon. However, as will be argued below, without making sustaining peace applicable to all countries, the agenda will remain an appendage to peacebuilding.

Complexity-Informed Paradigms for Measuring, Building, and Sustaining Peace

As intimated above, we have seen over the past decade that complex, adaptive system thinking (Gallo and Bartolucci 2008) is gradually replacing the linear, top-down strategies advocated by the dominant liberal peace paradigms. What is emerging are approaches that seek to draw attention to the interdependencies, relationality, and uncertainties which characterize societies as complex systems (Flaherty 2019). This has led several scholars and peace entrepreneurs and peacebuilding practitioners to also conceptualize peace as a complex system (IEP 2020b). This work has defined and measured its constituent elements to demonstrate that when these elements operate in a relationship of mutual dependence, they create a better foundation for self-sustainable peace. Complexity theory (de Coning 2020) facilitated by system thinking (McNamara 2005) has unlocked new insights for peace and conflict studies and proved a useful theoretical foundation for social scientists who study peace directly (SPP 2021).

Measuring Positive Peace

The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) was one of the early pioneers attempting to define and measure Galtung’s inspired notion of positive peace (B. S. Grewal 2003). For the Institute, positive peace is defined as the attitudes, institutions, and structures that underpin and sustain peaceful societies.

To facilitate its measurement, the IEP has developed a conceptual framework, known as the eight pillars of peace (IEP 2013), that outlines a system of eight factors that work together to build positive peace and enhances the effectiveness of peacebuilding (Vernon 2020). Among the eight pillars that underpin the framework, the following are often cited: well-functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbors, and free flow of information. The eight factors constitute an integrated system where change in one affects each of the others and the whole system. Countries who score highly across these pillars are more likely to maintain their stability and recover more easily from internal and external shocks (the case of Tunisia below). For the past several years, IEP has produced a yearly index of positive peace (IEP 2020a) that measures countries’ peacefulness against the eight pillars and their related indicators. Despite its shortcomings, the index, together with another IEP product called the Global Peace Index (IEP 2021), measuring negative peace, is making a meaningful contribution to the UN and non-UN entities involved in early warning (UNV 2018) and conflict prevention.

The Science of Sustaining Peace

A multidisciplinary team of researchers (Ashraf 2018) at Columbia University set out to study the dynamics of sustainably peaceful societies (Coleman et al. 2021) using the models and methods informed by complexity science (Coleman et al. 2019). They are among the few who have ventured into studying peace directly without transiting through conflict. Their findings validate existing peace theories and practices suggested by various critical scholars of the liberal approach. For example, through their research (Fry et al. 2021), they were able to determine that war and peace are not two ends of one continuum (Liebovitch et al. 2018); the drivers and inhibitors of peaceful relations are often categorically different from those of violence and war. They also affirmed that peace, like a tree, grows from the bottom-up. In situations of insecurity, violence, and conflict, it is people within everyday community-based structures who mobilize and act to minimize risk, foster relationships, and promote practices of peace. The research also found (Coleman et al. 2021) that countries with a well-articulated and shared vision for peace tend to be peaceful. A shared vision of peace entails strong mutuality and commitment to see through peace processes.

To test these findings, the researcher undertook ground-truthing field trips to Mauritius (Aumeerally et al. 2021) and Costa Rica (Coleman and Donahue 2018) that yielded a number of insightful lessons about what it takes to live in peace and what needs to be done to sustain it despite internal contradictions and external pressures.

Adaptive Peacebuilding

As noted above, one of the promising emerging paradigms for building peace is what Cedric de Coning calls adaptive peacebuilding (de Coning 2018). Adaptive peacebuilding also finds its theoretical foundation in complex system theory. The main characteristics of a complex system are its holistic nature, nonlinearity, and self-organization. For the purpose of this chapter, it is the latter that this study focuses on. Self-organization is “the ability of the system, to organize, regulate and maintain itself without needing an external or internal managing or controlling agent.” When under stress, a complex system uses these self-organizing capacities to adapt and evolve without losing “its basic integrity and stability in the process.” It draws on its resilient capacities to “fix itself.” Resilience, as explained by de Coning, refers to the ability of social institutions to “absorb and adapt to the shocks and setbacks they are likely to face.”

Adaptive peacebuilding therefore aims at facilitating and supporting the “emergence, consolidation and adaptation of local self-organizing social institutions that can manage tensions among its constituent elements, as well as between them and others in their broader environment, without lapsing into violent conflict.” Adaptive peacebuilding does not set out to achieve predetermined end states such as a specific democratic or judicial system.

To unleash the full potential of this innovative paradigm, this study recommends that, going forward, the adaptive framework should give the concept of “peacebuilding” a wide berth. Thus, it should be called the “adaptive/regenerative approach to building or sustaining peace.” Of course, what is proposed is not as succinct as “adaptive peacebuilding.” However, in prefacing peacebuilding by “adaptive,” there is a risk that this qualifier may be used as a subterfuge to make more palatable the hegemonic system of beliefs and values underpinning a contested paradigm. Or, as Paffenholtz commented in a recent article on perpetual peacebuilding (2021), adaptive peacebuilding could be “misused as an escape route leading to cosmetic adaptation rather than to transformative change.”

In this connection, the author would offer the same suggestion to Paffenholtz, citing the same risk. As explained here, the UN sustaining peace agenda has unfortunately given a lease on life to the very flawed peacebuilding enterprise that has hampered it from realizing its potential.

UN Sustaining Peace Agenda: The Norm and the Conceptual Muddle

So far it has been argued that to assess the transformative potential of the UN sustaining peace agenda, there is a need to first map the epistemological and conceptual mental frames and practices that have informed the ways this agenda has been conceived and interpreted and implemented. This discussion focused in particular on the three dominant approaches that have shaped the theory and practice of peacebuilding in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Because these approaches are dictated by a top-down, liberal system of implicit beliefs and values that are out of touch with everyday realities, the resulting international peacebuilding architecture has not built peace. In fact, the critical literature of the liberal peacebuilding enterprise, which was briefly reviewed, has facilitated the emergence of alternative approaches for capturing and building peace. Those approaches that highlighted complexity theory and systems thinking were deemed more likely, if properly harnessed, to lay a better foundation for sustaining peace from the inside-out.

It is against this background that that the discussion now turns to an explanation of the letter and spirit of the UN sustaining peace agenda and the conceptual muddle the differing interpretations to which this new norm has given rise.

The Norm

Sustaining peace, as a new conceptual framework for building peace, was first articulated in the substantively identical resolutions adopted (UNSC 2016) by the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly in April 2016. It was defined as “a goal and a process to build a common vision of a society, ensuring that the needs of all segments of the population are taken into account.” It encompasses “activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes, assisting parties to conflict to end hostilities, ensuring national reconciliation, and moving towards recovery, reconstruction and development.” The concept of sustaining peace (Caparini and Milante 2016) calls for better linkages between the UN’s three foundational pillars of peace and security, development, and human rights, in addition to humanitarian action. It replaces what until now has been viewed as a sequential approach to conflict that often resulted in silos—notably silos of prevention, humanitarian action, peacekee**, peacebuilding, and development—and calls for better linkages and sharing of instruments across these different sets of responses among the key pillars of the UN’s work to overcome institutional and sectoral silos.

Sustaining peace encompasses a number of peacebuilding interventions, including strengthening the rule of law, promoting sustainable economic growth, poverty eradication, social development, sustainable development, and national reconciliation. Some of the means and principles by which these interventions are pursued are inclusive dialogue and mediation, access to justice and transitional justice, accountability, good governance, democracy, accountable institutions, respect for human rights and gender equality, and sustainable development. The resolutions recognize that sustaining peace is “the primary responsibility of national governments and authorities in identifying, driving and directing priorities, strategies and activities” and highlights the importance of “inclusivity in national peacebuilding processes and objectives,” with particular emphasis on the need to increase women’s role “in decision making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution and peacebuilding.”

In addition to this panoply of liberal prescriptions, the resolutions include an array of activities and processes, including those relating to the coordination of the UN system activities on the ground under the banner of sustaining peace. While they are too long to detail here, many have been taken up by subsequent resolutions (UNSC 2020) and amply commented on elsewhere (Mahmoud and Súilleabháin 2016).

The Conceptual Muddle

Even though these resolutions were passed unanimously by the UN membership and judged (Mahmoud and Súilleabháin 2016) in many circles as a potentially transformative addition to the UN peacebuilding architecture, differing interpretations of what the concept of sustaining peace means in practice have activated minds within and outside the UN circles. Even the creation of a group of friends for sustaining peace (QUNO 2016) by the Permanent Mission of Mexico to the UN has not fully addressed these interpretations.

According to the former chair of the Advisory Group of Experts who led the 2015 review (UN 2015) of the peacebuilding architecture that introduced the concept of sustaining peace, there are two lingering concerns (Rosenthal 2017) in the minds of some member-states that may account for some of these differing interpretations. The first relates to suspicions that the sustaining peace framework is a normative trojan horse to justify further inroads in matters judged eminently internal to a country. The argument advanced by some (Caparini and Milante 2016) that the language around sustaining peace should be understood as a peace to be sustained rather than a peace to be built did not go far enough to assuage this concern. The other point of contention arises from the advocacy by influential stakeholders of the universal character of the sustaining peace framework. These stakeholders maintain that like the SDGs, the framework should be applicable to all countries, including seemingly peaceful countries, regardless of their level of development or degree of peacefulness, a point cogently made by Arifeen and Semul (2019) and cited above.

Furthermore, there are some who are of the view that the rebranding of various existing peacebuilding activities under the new nomenclature of sustaining peace risks contributing to conceptual muddle and confusion (Caparini and Milante 2016). This study suggests that this risk is unavoidable. The resolutions after strategically and loftily defining sustaining peace as a “goal and a process to build a vision” of an inclusive society suddenly drop it amid a concatenation of activities that routinely come under the intrusive liberal peacebuilding framework, however well-coordinated and integrated across the UN system these activities may be. This unhappy association with peacebuilding maintains the fallacy that anyone and everyone dedicated to deescalating violence and preventing its recurrence can be working for sustaining peace. While this is a critical endeavor, particularly in contexts under stress, it should be complemented by the equally important task of proactively identifying and strengthening the resilient endogenous capacities of peace. Prevention, as argued elsewhere (Mahmoud 2016), has greater chance of sustaining peace if it is freed from the negative attributes of its nemesis: conflict.

For the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, sustaining peace should not be viewed as rebranding (UNPSO 2017) existing work, but “rather a more practice-oriented comprehensive concept to prevent violent conflict, by addressing the drivers of conflict.” This is an explanation that conveys the misguided notion that peacebuilding can perform better (Mahmoud and Makoond 2018) if it is carried out under the umbrella of sustaining peace and that improved prevention would result in durable positive peace.

The International Peace Institute (IPI), in a paper published on the first anniversary of the sustaining peace resolutions, offered another interpretation of what sustaining peace should mean in practice (Mahmoud and Makoond 2017). It argues that sustaining peace, as indicated above, applies to all societies and is not necessarily confined to unstable environments or designed to calm the ravages of violent conflict. It is a multi-sectoral, endogenous, ongoing process that is the shared responsibility of states and all citizens. Peace needs to be made an objective policy of the state. This means that core government ministries, in addition to fulfilling their intrinsic functions, must explicitly address challenges to peace and contribute to laying the foundations for its sustainability.

This chapter further argues that the overarching mandate to sustain peace should be housed at the apex of national and local government structures. Ghana (Ministry of the Interior Republic of Ghana 2021) and Costa Rica (Redacción Chile 2009) were mentioned as examples of countries that have made resolving conflict amicably and sustaining peace as deliberate policy objectives. As the UN resolutions intimated, given that peace is the enabler and outcome of sustainable development, the effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their targets can be used as a vehicle for sustaining peace.

Out of the Muddle: Sustaining Peace Through an Adaptive Approach

Notwithstanding the lack of consensus in some circles on what the resolutions on sustaining peace may mean in practice, they constitute a valuable framework for the recently empowered UN Resident Coordinator (UNRC) system (UNDS 2018) at the country level. They provide them with a political tool for enhancing coordination and system-wide coherence across the UN pillars as called for by the recently enacted reforms of the UN development system (UN 2021). More importantly, they afford those more entrepreneurial UN Resident Coordinators (UNRCs) the opportunity to steer the sustaining peace agenda away from the paternalistic, templated peacebuilding paradigms where conflict prevention is treated as the sure pathway for building sustainable peace (United Nations and World Bank 2018).

In this connection, it is argued that the approaches informed by complexity theory and the science of sustaining peace (Coleman 2018a) could be particularly helpful in this endeavor. They offer less intrusive and politically sensitive entry points for hel** build peace from the inside out (IPI 2019), where ownership and agency for peace recovery rest with the local actors, with the UN playing only a catalytic role. Should this and similar approaches find their way to the UN system, they could also go a long way in mitigating the conceptual muddle the resolutions introduced. More importantly, they could help elevate the sustaining peace agenda to a transdisciplinary, strategic framework, moving it away from the obsession of making peacebuilding more effective for conflict contexts.

For example, if one were to explore the adaptive/regenerative engagement for building peace advocated by Cedric de Coning, the challenges facing countries in or emerging from crisis or conflict would be framed in terms of inadequate self-organizing societal capacity (de Coning 2016) to anticipate, manage, and resolve their own conflicts. Seen through this lens, the search for underlying causes of conflict so ingrained in the peacebuilding orthodoxy becomes a search for why this capacity is absent or inadequate and where it exists, how it can be reinforced. This analytical shift takes the UN Resident Coordinator (UNRC) system away from the obsessive examination of what is wrong (Vernon 2018) with the host country and offers national stakeholders, including youth and women thought leaders, an opportunity to articulate what is still going strong in their societies. Through this strength-based rather than a deficit-based approach, the uncovered resilience (Interpeace 2016) is treated as a resource not only to prevent conflict but also to lay the foundations for self-sustaining peace.

Despite the refreshing lens the adaptive approach offers, what is witnessed is that the hierarchical structures in some UN country offices and the power differential between local and international staff militate against exploring such alternative paths for building peace. The power differential may also prove challenging when it comes to harnessing local knowledge and disseminating it for the purpose of fostering sustainable peace. Recent research (PSD 2020b) has revealed that the knowledge that is valued and incentivized in peacebuilding is one that tends to promote Eurocentric liberal ideals of leadership and governance. For national NGOs that heavily depend on the financial contributions of international donors, these ideals tend to be promoted or perpetuated through the templated projects these NGOs design and implement on the ground and through the country analyses they send to the capitals of the donors. Such analyses tend to kowtow to a certain hierarchy of knowledge (PSD 2020b).

The above notwithstanding, the next section explores how the self-organizing component of the adaptive/regenerative approach to sustaining peace could, nonetheless, help in the case of Tunisia to overcome the above impediments and serve as a framework for determining the appropriate support to the country as it grapples with the unfolding crisis grip** it.

The Tunisia Case Study

Overview of the Unfolding Situation

On 25 July 2021, Tunisia’s Republic Day, President Kais Saied, invoking Article 80 of the Tunisian constitution (Parker 2021), fired the prime minister, dismissed the government, and froze the work of the parliament for a period of 30 days. He also lifted immunity from members of parliament and took over the duties of the public prosecutor. The president’s actions were greeted with jubilation by an overwhelming majority of the population whose earlier vociferous, disobedient peace (PSD 2020a) rallies amid stringent Covid-19 restrictions served as a backdrop. Since then, he has taken a number of initiatives that further endeared him to the masses. This included the mobilization of the army and hundreds of volunteers to accelerate vaccinations against Covid-19 that in one day benefited over 4% of the population of 11 million (France 24 2021). If sustained, and it seems to be (M. Saleh 2022), Tunisia will have stemmed the catastrophic spread of the pandemic that made it the second-most infected country in Africa.

Reactions to this extraordinary event of 25 July poured in from within and without the country, with only a few qualifying the president’s decision as a coup (Lee 2021) or as an affront to Tunisia’s democratic gains. Most of the others, seeing the popular support he received, adopted a wait-and-see attitude, calling for the respect of human rights (USDS 2021), for dialogue, and for the need for a road map to restore constitutional order. Yet others felt that the president’s action was salutary as the country was fast moving toward a precipice, following a decade of successive inept and corrupt governments (H. Saleh 2021) in the hands of a political elite that had highjacked electoral democracy and the state to enrich themselves.

A number of foreign so-called experts (Kirby 2021), some of whom are living in illiberal or flawed democracies, through their distorted analyses (Chettaoui 2021) stripped Tunisia from the complexity of its internal politics (Cook 2021) and glossed over the uncertainties that characterize transitions to democracy. Most importantly, they underplayed the resilient capacities Tunisians have leveraged over the past decade to weather equally serious crises and come out of them stronger. At the time of writing, the situation nevertheless remains quite fluid. On 25 August 2021, because of new internal and external factors, the president extended the emergency powers (The Arab Weekly 2021) until further notice, to the consternation of some. He is, however, still enjoying overwhelming popular support, despite a very difficult economic and social situation, made worse by the deleterious impact the war in Ukraine has had on energy and food supplies worldwide.

Applying the Self-organization Lens to Tunisia

As a former UN Resident Coordinator (UNRC) and knowing what is now known about the various approaches to building peace, the author asks what should be done if the UN were asked for support in the management of this critical phase of Tunisia’s democratic transition. The answer should be to use the adaptive/regenerative approach with a view to making the appropriate context-sensitive decisions about how the UN system should position itself vis-à-vis the unfolding situation described above. In particular, it is very important to listen to Tunisians with the intent to understand and not with the intent to help or solve. A safe and structured space for them to uncover the self-correction, self-organizing capacities they had leveraged to peacefully manage present and past turbulent period should be created.

Some of those who analyzed developments soon after the president had taken those exceptional measures pointed to a number of these self-organizing capacities (Chettaoui 2021). One is the strength of ordinary citizens imbued with a sense of solidarity in times of national stress, while the other is a vibrant civil society that does not sit idly by as events unfold. Examples of actions taken by the latter are statements issued by influential women organizations (AFTD 2021), the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists, and other organizations, who pointed to the unconstitutionality (Al Bawsala 2021) of some of these measures. In the absence of a constitutional court, a parliament, and other checks and balances, some of these organizations vowed to remain vigilant and make known their views (M.B.Z. 2021) as the situation evolves.

During the 2013 acute political crisis, two prominent political figures were assassinated; the national labor union, together with three other mass membership organizations, brought together the main protagonists around the same table and brokered an agreement that put an end to the crisis. Their effort was hailed as salutary. In 2015, the quartet were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (2015). Regrettably, the dialogue process used to pacify the nation in 2013 is now discredited because it had, in the eyes of the population, given a lease on life to the same discredited and rapacious political elite that was at the origin of the crisis. The above notwithstanding, some form of a national consultation will be needed to vet the president’s vision of decentralized democracy (Jaidi 2021).

In addition to the above resilient capacities, the 2014 constitution (Tunisia 2014), flawed as it may be, has served as a bulwark in times of turmoil and enabled Tunisians to refer to it whenever their rights are infringed. It has also facilitated the passage of pioneering laws such as those criminalizing racial segregation and violence against women. And it is this very constitution that made it possible for the president to act as a “safety valve” and diffuse a severe crisis that could have pushed the country over the edge. Among other self-organizing institutional capacities, one could mention a weakened but resilient public administration (Abdellaoui 2021), women’s strong voice and leadership (Yerkes and McKeown 2018), the mostly free flow of information (Freedom House 2020), and, oddly enough, the military (S. Grewal 2019).

The main point that is conveyed through this case study is that Tunisia, from a complexity-informed approach to peace, has enough self-organizing assets and agency to “fix” its own problems (Ghani and Lockhart 2009). To avoid falling into the hierarchy of knowledge traps mentioned above, international actors should draw on the strength of their ignorance (Mahmoud 2021), which gives them the permission to ask probing questions and allows answers to emerge from the inside out, from those closest to the problem. They should also resist engineering specific outcomes (de Coning 2016) that would produce, to quote de Coning again, “the opposite effect of that which sustaining peace aims to achieve.” Their efforts should be limited to “safeguarding, stimulating, facilitating and creating a space” for the country to develop and strengthen its resilient capacities for self-organization and self-reliance. Whatever additional support the country might require should not unwittingly undermine these capacities (Mahmoud 2019), however insignificant they may appear in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.

The complexity-informed practices of doing-no-harm (Massabni 2018) on the part of outside actors and the elicitive approaches of co-creating knowledge about peace, outlined above, are the hallmark of what is called integral leadership. Such leadership, if mindfully applied, would facilitate the internalization of the conceptual and attitudinal shifts advocated by emerging peace paradigms such as the adaptive approach. It would also serve as a catalyst for actualizing the promise of the sustaining peace agenda.

What Is Integral Leadership?

Classical leadership paradigms that focus on the development of a set of individual skills or behaviors are now judged inadequate for the volatile, unpredictable, complex, and interdependent world sketched in the introductory part of this paper. As a consequence, new forms and concepts of leadership have emerged: shared leadership, collective/system leadership (Mahmoud 2021), compassionate leadership, process leadership (Mahmoud 2020), and so on. They all consider leadership as a relational process, an ever-evolving practice rather than a position or series of attributes or actions associated with an individual person.

Over the past few years, the UN system has made commendable efforts in elevating leadership to the strategic level that the recent internal reforms in the peace, security, and development pillars require. It has developed several frameworks (UN 2017) and principles that promote and incentivize some aspects of the relational dimension of leadership, including systems thinking and collective leadership. This is in addition to other frameworks (DHF 2020) and standard templates (UNSDG 2020) that were developed to facilitate the implementation of the new resident coordinator system (UNDOCO 2016). They largely focus on the values, attributes, and practices that are needed for the newly empowered and independent RC (UNGA and UNSC 2020) to support countries in preventing and resolving violent conflict and building sustainable peace. It is, however, recognized in some circles (DHF 2021) that because the RCs do not have the range of experience, skills, and capacities needed to fulfill their multidimensional roles with which they are entrusted, co-leadership or collective leadership is essential.

For the purpose of this chapter and as alluded above, it is this type of collective, integral leadership that this chapter now focuses on as an additional catalytic component toward unleashing the full potential of the sustaining peace agenda. Without delving into the theoretical moorings (Reams 2005) of integral leadership and its potential for managing complexity (Bililies 2015), or into what peace leadership (Amaladas and Byrne 2018) looks like from an integral perspective (Miller and Green 2015), a brief overview of what integral leadership is, followed by how it could be applied for the purposes of sustaining peace (Mahmoud 2019), is offered below.

What does integral mean? Integral means everything that is necessary to make a whole complete. It is something undivided where all the parts are interconnected. Integral leadership seeks completeness, allowing disciplines to connect functionally. It is not a place to be or something to achieve, and it is not a stage to be reached. It is an ever-evolving journey, an ongoing developmental becoming. It is a transdisciplinary approach. It includes all aspects of a living human system: from community, to society, to nature, culture, and spirituality, to science and technology, to enterprise and economics. Integral leadership holds the view that everybody has a piece of the truth (Wilber 2021). Integrating those truths ushers in a new level of wisdom for tackling complex problems that could not be solved by those partial, competing worldviews and taking the best of each. That is why integral leadership integrates perspectives from other leadership frameworks, such as systems leadership (Dreier et al. 2019). It also shuns linear problem-solving and uncovers and harnesses existing local knowledge systems (USAID 2014) for sustainable solutions to problems. This type of leadership is aptly summarized by Peter Senge (2021), a prominent expert on systems thinking, as “the capacity of the human community to shape its future.”

Integral Leadership for Sustaining Peace

For the purposes of sustaining peace, integral leadership as defined above should serve as a transformative framework for co-creating the catalytic conditions (Mahmoud 2020) that would enable the UN system and the RC in particular to unleash the potential of the UN sustaining peace agenda. To succeed in this endeavor, it should minimally reframe the sustaining peace narrative from a holistic perspective, simultaneously unleashing the feminineFootnote 1 leadership power of women and harnessing the leadership peace capacity of youth (SCG 2014).

Start with Reframing the Norm from an Integral Perspective

The sustaining peace narrative, as enshrined in UN resolutions and as enriched by the other perspectives presented in this chapter, should be interpreted as the existence of an attitudinal, institutional, relational, and transactional ecosystem (Ricigliano 2012) that can prevent the outbreak of violent conflict, and simultaneously and proactively identify and strengthen the endogenous conditions for self-sustaining peace. As can be noted, sustaining peace appears in the resolutions as a gerund. It conveys the sense that the pursuit of peace, as alluded earlier, is an unfinished, ongoing process of becoming rather than an end-state, often understood as the durable absence of conflict. From an integral leadership perspective, sustaining peace should be conceived as an organizing meta-theory, where the plurality of paradigms (Funk 2002) about how peace is conceived and enacted would find a home. Its application would entail examining the assumptions, the mental models (Clear 2021) informing each paradigm and taking the best peace promotive practices, which when put together form a basis for effective, transdisciplinary action.

Sustaining peace, thus reframed, would fail its transdisciplinary mission if it were to exclude from its remit peace with nature, as enshrined in the Paris Climate Agreement and the SDGs, which, notwithstanding serious implementation deficits and setbacks, remain an integrated blueprint for peace, people, and planet. Sustaining peace as a holistic framework cannot exclude either the nurturing of just, effective, and inclusive institutions, or the promotion of gender equality and women’s leadership, drawing on relevant normative frameworks, including the Women, Peace and Security agenda, despite its limitations (Mahmoud 2018b). Nor can it ignore the multifaceted interlinkages between health and peace (WHO 2020).

Because Africa has had a critical impact in defining the limitations of international peacebuilding, an overarching framework for sustaining peace should also draw on the rich repertoire of indigenous African infrastructures of peace (Murithi 2006), some of which have Africanized integral leadership through an Ubuntu lens (Matupire 2019). Such a framework should also integrate the insights arising from epistemological advances led by African (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018) and Latin American (Cruz 2021) scholars toward decolonial peace (Zondi 2017), which has emerged as a result of efforts to interrogate the dominant geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo 2002) that presided over the dissemination of a single valid concept of peace.

The above integral conceptual reframing of sustaining peace, while appearing as a matter of common sense, is hard to promote within the UN without the exercise of system thinking and great deal of humility and presence, let alone resources. As experience in Burundi attests (Mahmoud and Mbiatem 2021), it is a challenging undertaking both at the individual and collective levels. This is largely due to the long-standing systemic barriers (Alliance for Peacebuilding 2017) that prevent the UN country team from seeing the larger system and forcing it to concentrate only on the parts that are most visible (Reed 2006) from their own vantage point. Another systemic barrier is the state-centric UN architecture that militates against a people-centered (Mahmoud 2018a) and inclusive approach to building peace. An adaptive approach to peace implemented from an integral perspective may help overcome this additional impediment.

Unleash Feminine Leadership

Integral leadership for sustaining peace cannot succeed as an overarching collective capacity without harnessing the power of feminine leadership (Menard 2019), particularly in times of adversity. In addition to exacting a high toll on humanity, and on women in particular, the Covid-19 pandemic has had many silver linings, particularly with respect to feminine leadership. In many societies, it has unleashed women’s leadership potential in visible and unprecedented ways (Hamilton 2011), beyond victimhood or the celebration of frontline heroism (Costello and Boswell 2020) that glosses over the systemic failures that jeopardize their lives and well-being. In countries (Wilson 2020) where responses to the virus and its related crises have produced sustainable outcomes, effective feminine leadership was on full display. Throughout the crisis, women in leadership position (Zenger and Folkman 2020) were able to mobilize collective sensemaking, foster a shared purpose (Hamilton 2011), and take decisions that were both decisive and compassionate.

Research (Zenger and Folkman 2020) has shown that in the darkest hours of human need, women lead in integral ways. They know how to mobilize their inner knowing to leapfrog over barriers and assume a leadership role that seamlessly marries the resources of the head, the heart, and the hands in the service of their family, community, and society. Integral leadership for sustaining peace would want to create the necessary policies and structures that would enable this feminine leadership potential to flourish at all times as a strategic resource for societal transformation and change. This is all the more important at a moment when peace and security paradigms are breaking down and new ones are emerging (Bressan 2017), a moment that could benefit from freeing the feminine wing of the mythical bird of humanity (Vetter et al. 2018), without falling prey to gender essentialism stereotypes (Powell 2017). An integral perspective of peace leadership (Miller and Green 2015) will help uncover women’s understanding of peace through the multiple identities they inhabit. Such understanding would in turn help inform the work of men and women (Cook-Huffman and Snyder 2017) in co-creating a propitious environment for self-enduring peace to take root. The emerging scholarship on and practice of integral African feminine leadership (Naicker 2020), among other examples of women’s leadership in African contexts (Poltera 2019), can make a meaningful contribution in this regard. As can girls and young women’s grassroots activism that is increasingly viewed as a source of innovative, intergenerational policy-making (Luttrell-Rowland et al. 2021), despite the multiple challenges faced by these women, often in inhospitable environments.

Beyond Inclusion: Intergenerational Co-leadership for Peace

It has been a common narrative to state that peace will not be sustainable if the voices of youth are not included. However, young people no longer buy into this shallow discourse. They are tired of being included (Sharief 2020) in peace engineering processes that are not designed for them and where the older generation has the upper hand in decision-making. They are now calling for an intergenerational co-leadership approach (Chebbi 2020) that enables different generations to co-create and co-produce solutions (AFLI 2020) that are aligned with young people’s perspectives about the future (Chebbi 2020) and about the place of peace in it.

An integral leadership approach to sustaining peace should minimally aim at strengthening institutional capacities to support young people’s agency, voice, and leadership so they can co-design pathways (African Union 2020) toward more just and peaceful societies. Reframing the sustaining peace agenda as a holistic meta-framework, unleashing the feminine leadership power of women, and leveraging intergenerational co-leadership for peace are just illustrative ways of how integral leadership can be exercised to help shift patterns of thinking, knowing, and doing in the face of dominant beliefs about how peace should be built and sustained. And in so doing, such leadership can play a catalytic role in hel** the UN sustaining peace agenda live up to its potential. In this regard, the leadership templates that have been developed to enhance the performance of UNRCs could benefit from exploring the above and other holistic practices of integral leadership.

Conclusions

We live in a world in constant flux, with seemingly intractable challenges that have laid bare the inadequacy of existing solutions. In the area of peace and security, the crisis of multilateralism and the changing nature of violent conflict, as painfully evidenced by the unfolding war in Ukraine, have accelerated the breakdown of many of the paradigms, whose relevance we have long taken for granted. This is the case of the peacebuilding paradigm. The main question that this paper has attempted to address is how to ensure that the promises of the UN sustaining peace agenda are not used as a noble disguise for the maintenance of a hegemonic norm that is no longer equal to the peace challenges we face.

This chapter has offered elements of an answer to this question. In the first part, it unpacked some of the powerful liberal assumptions that have implicitly informed our understanding of “peace” and of the theory and practice underpinning the UN peacebuilding enterprise. Some alternative conceptions of peace and related approaches on how it should be built were then presented. These approaches have emerged mainly as the result of the critical literature that documented the failures of the traditional peacebuilding paradigm. Those approaches that were informed by complexity theory and systems thinking, with a critical look at the adaptive approach to building peace, were particularly highlighted.

In the second part of the chapter, the letter and spirit of the UN sustaining peace agenda were presented. The author lamented the conceptual muddle that its association with peacebuilding had created, casting a long shadow on the transformative potential its framers had ascribed to it. Four strategies for hel** liberate the agenda from the clutches of peacebuilding and unleashing the promises it still holds were suggested. The first is to recommend that the UN system internalize the innovative, empirically based, conceptual, and practical shifts underpinning the new thinking about peace, whether it is a measurable global commons, a social contract with nature, or a discrete SDG. The second is to encourage the UNRCs on the ground to explore the implementation of the complexity-based adaptive approach to building peace, despite the state-constraints imposed by UN state-centric architectures. To facilitate such an exploration, Tunisia was used as a case study to demonstrate how its broad methodology could make a positive contribution to the country as it grappled with a severe, multidimensional crisis. Third, it is contended that in order to actualize the first two suggested actions, a special kind of a catalytic leadership is needed. The case for integral leadership as a collective capacity for harnessing societal strengths and co-creating positive change was then made. Under the impulse of this leadership, sustaining peace would be reframed as an overarching, transdisciplinary framework where the best of existing peace paradigms could find a home. Fourth, it is argued that for integral leadership to succeed, it must create the normative and policy environment that would unleash the formidable power of feminine leadership and youth agency, among other national capacities, for peace.

The above strategies if fully implemented could go a long way toward unleashing the potential of the sustaining peace agenda. However, as the chapter intimated, this will not have the desired impact if it continues to be viewed as solely relevant to conflict countries and not as a global public good to be pursued by all societies regardless of their level of development or degree of peacefulness.