In the summer of 2011, I attended the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at the Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia. The courses I attended that summer and the people I’ve met were life-changing, to say the least. They catapulted my career in all kinds of directions and many of the endeavors on my journey until this day are directly or indirectly the result of that summer. Some of the courses I took were Arts and Media-Based Peacebuilding, Research as Art and Transformation, and Transforming Societal Narratives. But the course I’ll be talking about today was called Analysis, Strategy and Design of Peacebuilding Programs. It was given by Peter Woodrow and Diana Chigas from CDA Inc.

People who work with me know that I’m extremely critical about how peacebuilding programs are designed, implemented and evaluated, but this course restored my faith in the efficiency of peacebuilding programming. It presented many tools developed by CDA Inc. over the years from lessons learned from studying huge peacebuilding programs all over the world. These different tools covered the whole process of programming from analysis, to design, implementation, and evaluation & learning! And among these tools is the now-famous (and sometimes infamous) in the development field; systems thinking, especially when used for conflict analysis.

Systemic Conflict Analysis deals with not just the factors of a conflict, but also the dynamics between them. It’s not about analysis (which can have a large part based on opinion), but synthesis; it looks at the parts and how they synthesize to create the whole and look at it with its complexities. Instead of simplifying problems, it helps us complexify our thinking to understand them. And most importantly, it helps us explore not only how “A” affects “B”, but also how “B” affects “A” (even if that’s not as direct the former dynamic).

So yes, just like that sounds, Systems Thinking is not easy. It originated in the schools of engineering and peacebuilding practitioners are mostly not engineers. With my scientific leanings it was attractive to me. It felt like there was finally a method to the madness. Still, I didn’t feel that I can comfortably use the tool yet. Regardless, the dream started; the dream of this method being adopted by every organization and person working in the field of peacebuilding or even development in general. CDA Inc. shared this dream. But they knew how complex this tool was. They knew that it might require multiple training sessions of the same material to the same people. They knew that they needed to train practitioners as well as funding agencies, ministries, policy makers,… And, indeed, they embarked on that journey. Between 2011 and 2013, I attended 4 workshops that included training and developing the tool in different contexts. These workshops were culminated by a master training by CDA Inc. at Harvard University in Boston.

That training was attended by a cohort of international practitioners who have been using the tool for a while, albeit in their own organizations. There were two other Arabic-speaking participants with me and all three of us were from Lebanon. We knew that spreading this tool in the Arab world was extremely important. As a matter of fact, spreading this tool all over the world was of utmost importance, especially that it acted as the foundation for other tools developed by CDA, Inc. that are of equal importance and efficiency (like Reflecting on Peace Practice and Do No Harm). We tried to start using as much as we could and wherever we could. Nevertheless, they were sporadic attempts here and there. It was nothing systematic that would lead to a large-scale adoption of it.

Around 2017, something wonderful happened. USAID started incorporating Systemic Conflict Analysis it in its methods and requirements. It wasn’t about USAID as much as it was about the fact that it is one of the biggest funding agencies in the world. And that started the real spread of Systemic Conflict Analysis all over the world. In the Arab world, we’ve worked on analyses of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq so far.

The dream is starting to come true and we’ve been working on creating more and more Arab practitioners, users, and experts in the tool.

If you want to know more about Systemic Conflict Analysis, Reflecting on Peace Practice, and/or Do No Harm and how they can be used separately or in synergy together, or if you want to use them in work and you don’t know where to start from, let’s have a chat.