Abstract
This chapter shares the story of indigenous-led peacebuilding, illustrating an effective shift in nongovernmental organization (NGO) role from international interventionist to catalyst and facilitator. Drawing from participatory action research and emergent peacebuilding design, the Warriors to Peace Guardians–Baringo project established an inclusive network of diverse peace guardians in three remote pastoralist communities in Kenya. The extant literature suggests that support for grassroots peacebuilding is often hampered by Western teleological approaches that have limited capacity to deal with complexity and emergence. With the support of the United States Institute of Peace, this project overcame such limitations, adapting successfully to emergent realities on the ground, and retaining indigenous ownership in partnership with an international NGO, Mediators Beyond Borders International.
Gail Ervin is Mediators Beyond Borders Kenya Initiative (MBB-KI) Team Leader, and Mary-Anne Lechoe is the Peace Guardians Core leadership group Team Leader. Many thanks to Mediators Beyond Borders International (MBBI) Team members Victoria Grey, Lisa Rose, Prabha Sankaranarayan, and Marcus Tan de Bibiana for their wonderful insights and contributions to this chapter.
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- 1.
The conclusions from this dissertation research (Ervin, 2016), developed with the participation of 17 Kenyan and MBBI co-researchers, provide the empirical and theoretical basis for the lessons learned and design of the project discussed in this chapter.
- 2.
Cattle rustling is a term that covers all livestock raiding.
- 3.
As noted in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Guidance (2014, p. 9), “insider mediation” has not yet been defined in conflict resolution literature. UNDP defines it as “[i]ndividual(s), groups, entities or institutions possessing high levels of legitimacy and trust with the individuals and institutions involved in a specific conflict setting by virtue of their relationships and reputation with the parties and who/which possess a unique ability to directly and indirectly influence the conflict parties’ behaviour and thinking.”
- 4.
“The long-term goal of peacebuilding programs is generally encompassed within the concept of peace writ large, a term developed by Mary B. Anderson and Lara Olson (2003) and used to describe changes at the broad level of society that include stopping destructive conflict and violence and building a just and sustainable peace. It refers to a preferred state of human existence provided by cumulative peacebuilding at all levels (Anderson & Olson, 2003; Anderson, Chigas, & Woodrow, 2008; Chigas & Woodrow, 2009). Peace writ large was introduced to address the lack of vocabulary to define peace at the broader societal level (CDA, 2009; Chigas & Woodrow, 2009)” (Ervin, 2016).
- 5.
There is no universal agreement on the definition of emergence. Emergence is generally defined as the manner in which patterns and complex systems develop out of the multiple elements of relatively simple interactions. In this chapter we use Goldstein’s (1999) initial approach, which defines emergence as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems” (p. 49). This is distinct from the simple definition and common usage of the term to indicate appearance or development (Ervin, 2016).
- 6.
Peace Guardians are pastoralist volunteers, selected by their communities, who are committed to peace in and between their communities, and designated as their community leaders for peace.
- 7.
Youth in Kenya are defined as young men and women 15–30 years of age. Pastoralists further organize groups into cyclical age sets corresponding to a set of years, recurring over generations (Keesing, 1981). In general, boys who reach a clan’s age criteria at the start of each age set are circumcised and become warriors, then progress to junior elders, and then various classes of elders. Samburu age sets are established every 15 years (B. Nabaala, personal communication, April 2014), while others could be as short as every 5–6 years (Keesing, 1981).
- 8.
Triandis (2001) distinguishes collectivist cultures from individualist cultures, often referred to as “western.” “People in collectivist cultures, compared to people in individualist cultures, are likely to define themselves as aspects of groups, to give priority to in-group goals, to focus on context more than the content in making attributions and in communicating, to pay less attention to internal than to external processes as determinants of social behavior, to define most relationships with ingroup members as communal, to make more situational attributions, and tend to be self-effacing” (p. 907).
- 9.
Traditional remote village surrounded by a thorn-bush branch fence.
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Ervin, G.M., Lechoe, MA. (2018). Warriors to Peace Guardians—Emergent Peacebuilding Design in Kenya. In: d'Estrée, T., Parsons, R. (eds) Cultural Encounters and Emergent Practices in Conflict Resolution Capacity-Building. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71102-7_6
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