Are we facing the dusk or dawn in the field of peacebuilding? Yes!
Peacebuilding approaches that evolved from the end of the Soviet Union to the COVID pandemic are under duress, if not in collapse. Many analysts try to fit the emergent shape-shifting of U.S. domestic and international relations into established ideological categories. Alternatively, exploring the co-mingling of three core dynamics might offer insight into what peacebuilding must face today: the challenge of funnel vision; the all-consuming commitment to national militarized security; and the rise of oligarch-scapes.
Funnel Vision
Funnel vision describes the search for absolute and ultimate control over that which remains permanently elusive. A funnel functions by bringing the fluid, chaotic movement of liquid-in-gravity to order by obligating submission to and through a single point of control. For national politics, funnel vision as a dynamic seeks supremacy writ large from political to economic to cultural narrative power to dominate perceived internal and external threats.
Funnel vision expresses itself fractally, from individual psychology driven by fear and paranoia to systemic orientation that pursues perceived threats to that dominance.
- Complexity must be ignored or mastered.
- Interdependence is weakness and must bend to the will of the strong.
- All action must orient around the unique system goal of attaining material and narrative control.
Militarized Security
Authoritarian approaches to politics have sharply increased national investment in militarized security leading frighteningly into hegemonic wars and paramilitary-like behavior deployed against civilian populations. The militarization, particularly in international wars, functions as opportunity to deploy cutting edge new generation weaponry and to experiment with lightning action bereft of secondary planning for longer-term local or global well-being.
A common trait across these approaches: actions taken on behalf of “national security” circumvent local, national, and international accountability. Almost to a case, success is judged by whether overwhelming military superiority was achieved than by any standard of moral, collective or global good.
Oligarch-scapes
Difficult to name, the emergent patterns pertain to how extreme wealth rests in the hands of very few people who benefit from rare influence on traditional state actors, yet are rarely accountable to national and international political or legal standards.
While the contemporary term oligarch associates with the rise of wealthy nonstate individuals in the post-Soviet period, Greek etymology captured the core dynamic: “the rule of the few.” However, we must go beyond this term to describe the contemporary dynamic. The suffix –scape was first used in Middle Dutch discourse (schap) to describe the framing power of background, landscape scenery in fine arts painting. Perhaps oligarch-scape provides a way to describe the complex reality that at once identifies the individual, the rare few of extraordinary wealth, while also capturing the wider public space they shape, form, contain, and seek to dominate.
Contemporary politics, government, media, economics, and the militarization of conflict unfolds in this oligarch-scape. More than the tyranny of the few, this dynamic represents the rule of the unfettered backgrounding – agnostic to ideology, untethered to any moral collective, compass except for accumulating self-replication, and always seated at the margins just beyond direct accountability.
Peacebuilding Alternatives
These three co-mingling dynamics defy much of what has been learned by way of deep practice and research about what leads to and sustains peace. The evolutionary learning of peacebuilding has provided evidence that complexity forms the very nature of our political and social landscapes, interdependency the web within which innovation and response must emerge.
At this crossroads moment, peacebuilding must offer alternative pathways to the toxic co-mingling of funnel vision, militarized security, and oligarch-scapes while innovating approaches that sit at the core of evidence-based learning.
- Adept coordinated and multi-layered approaches to diplomacy coupled with grounded, proximate actors have shown greater capacity to prevent violence and sustain enduring change.
- Developing and assuring citizen participation and the protection of social movements’ rights to nonviolent expression increase the viability and enduring shifts away from cyclical violence.
- Investment in deliberative and collaborative approaches to whole-globe challenges – defined as those which are impossible to exclusively address within the purview and action of a single nation – increases capacity for collective response, reduces levels of violence, and increases wider collective well-being in terms of economics, health, and education.
In sum, both national and international security are not defined by the size, innovative evolution, or quantity of weapons, or tactical efficiency of their use. Rather, they emerge from the quality of relationships and the capacity people and leaders have for engaging and assuring mutual respect, fairness, and cohering around a wider common good.
At essence, the key to peacebuilding is not how we dominate complexity but rather how we mobilize the mindset of contribution and coordination over the mindset of control, and how we seek change that humanizes conflict, cultivates dignity, and builds toward relationships capable of pursuing healing and justice.
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This article is adapted from Dr. Lederach’s speech entitled “The Fifty-Year Arc: A Practitioner’s Adventures with Peace Processes,” delivered at the Kroc Institute’s Strategic Peacebuilding Academy and featured on the Kroc Cast.
About the Author
John Paul Lederach is Professor Emeritus of International Peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, as well as a Senior Fellow at Humanity United.
Recommended Citation
Lederach, John Paul. “Dawn or Dusk? Three Emergent Dynamics Facing Peacebuilding.” Peace Policy: Solutions to Violent Conflict, No. 63, (March 2026). https://doi.org/10.7274/31843000
