Most peacebuilding efforts start with a good, well-intentioned idea.
- A reintegration model that supports former fighters.
- A community dialogue that rebuilds trust.
- A youth employment initiative to prevent radicalization.
But most peacebuilding efforts don’t scale. They remain local, time-bound, and heavily dependent on outside funding.
These aren’t bad ideas. They have been the bread and butter of peacebuilding for decades and peacebuilders have produced a lot of positive local impact through these interventions (two of my favorite publicly available examples are the Women’s Action Peace Network in Liberia and Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone). They are also typically positioned, as the two examples illustrate, to respond to violence in specific communities rather than prevent it at scale.
If we think about peacebuilding as a preventative measure that can reach the scale necessary to address the level of need, then just doing more of these traditional peacebuilding interventions is not sufficient.
Prevention and scale require a different way of working. While many describe this as a systems approach, we don’t often explain what we mean by “systems”. Today, I want to illustrate what a systems approach to peacebuilding is, by drawing from Jim McKelvey’s book The Innovation Stack.
The Innovation Stack is a book about how world-changing solutions don’t come from a single invention, but from a stack of interconnected innovations that, together, make something truly resilient and hard to copy.
McKelvey learned this while co-founding Square, the mobile payments company. The company succeeded not because of a clever and convenient credit card reader, but because it built an entire stack of innovations: hardware, fraud protection, transparent pricing, elegant design, accessible customer service, and more. It was this whole system—not any one part—that allowed Square to succeed.
What does this have to do with peace?
Everything.
Read the full article on Substack
