Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation

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 area’s practitioners, researchers/academics/educators, and consultants, as well as policy makers.

Emery Brusset is a graduate of Yale University and the London Schools of Economics, who has worked in emergency aid in different conflict zones around the world. Over the last 20 years he has specialised in performance evaluation and impact assessment. He is now head of Social Terrain, which is an impact investment project developer. Mr Brusset is French, and living in England. 

Cedric de Coning is a Senior Researcher with the Peace and Conflict Research Group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and a Senior Advisor on Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding for ACCORD. His research focus is on international peace operations and peacebuilding policies and practices. 

Bryn Hughes specialises in applying Complexity Thinking to organisational performance, learning and assessment. He has lectured in peace and conflict subjects, and his publications include co-authoring Forging New Conventional Wisdom Beyond International Policing: Learning fromComplex Realities and co-editing Making Sense of Peace and Capacity-Building: Rethinking Policing.