Key findings: Community peacebuilding initiatives have been developed in several conflict-affected countries. In fragile and (post)conflict-affected settings, community-led processes to peacebuilding can complement state structures and institutions that are often weak in capacity or political will.Most community peacebuilding initiatives in South Asia are relatively new. As such, evaluation reports have generally concluded that the timeframe of the project and/or evaluation is too short to observe significant long-term outcomes yet.
The main outcome identified from the literature consulted in this query are :
- Support and acceptance of community initiatives by the police and courts, including increased referral of cases for mediation
- Buy-in from other government agencies
- Influencing social attitudes and behaviour
- Changing perceptions of the role of women in society
- Extension and expansion of the project
- Requests from other organisations for capacity building
The need for a genuine bottom-up, participatory approach to community peacebuilding also comes through as a message from the research, with warnings about decreased effectiveness when traditional bodies are created or promoted too heavily by the international community or national government actors, as has been the case in some of the initiatives in Afghanistan.
