Personal Reflections from a Grassroots Peacebuilding Journey

Authors

Mark Clark, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Abstract

This article presents the author’s personal reflections from experiences over the past thirty years, working at the intersection of leadership development, complexity, and conflict: a journey from corporate law, the British Army, and armed conflict, through the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the US-led coalition’s intervention in Iraq, emergency humanitarian response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and violence reduction and post-conflict reconciliation in Papua New Guinea, to a Jordan-based international peacebuilding organization that supports grassroots peacebuilding efforts in fifty-two countries, and finally a return home to Scotland. It is a journey of naïveté, hubris, curiosity, and an attempt at sense-making. It describes the application of peacebuilding theories in practice in diverse contexts. Although it does not purport to offer any solutions, it concludes that courageous leadership is needed: to embrace conflict as a source of energy for positive, constructive, generative development; to resist the seductive drama and hero-leadership of focusing only on present crises; and to focus more investment on upstream prevention.

Recommended Citation

Clark, Mark (2024) "Personal Reflections from a Grassroots Peacebuilding Journey," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 36: Iss. 1, Article 14.
Available at: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol36/iss1/14