Call for Participants:
Decolonising Partnerships across Aid and Peacebuilding
From 18th - 19th October, Peace Direct will hold a two-day online consultation on ‘Decolonising Partnerships across Aid and Peacebuilding.’ We invite activists, changemakers across the aid and peacebuilding sectors committed to decolonising and preventing conflict to be part of the conversation.
Deadline to register: Monday 17th October
Peace Direct’s publications: “Time to Decolonise Aid” and “Race, Power, and Peacebuilding” presented how structural racism and discrimination manifest in the international humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding sectors. They do this by failing to acknowledge their colonial legacy, unequal global-local power dynamics, and by the normalisation of ‘White saviourism’. Financial and programmatic partnerships in peace processes between international and local development organizations have historically been characterized by hierarchies, paternalism and top-down approaches to relationship-building.
As the discourse around decolonisation and attempts to ‘shift the power’ gain momentum, the peacebuilding sector has struggled to address the sector’s racism unequal power dynamics between the Global North and the Global South. For most practitioners, policymakers and donors from the Global North, the path to a decolonised approach remains unclear.
We need to develop a clear path that will practically put in place these ideas and effectively redress the unequal global power balance to best support communities leading peacebuilding efforts.
To this end, Peace Direct will hold a series of consultations to discuss ways to operationalise a decolonised approach in the peacebuilding sector. To begin, we will hold a two-day online conversation from 18-19th October. It will be held using Platform4Dialogue.
Over the two days, some of the key overarching questions we will be asking are as follows:
- What is the purpose of partnerships across aid and peacebuilding?
- What should a successfully decolonised partnerships look like?
- What barriers currently prevent meaningful partnerships between local and external actors?
- Should partnerships challenge and shift power imbalances and patterns of exclusion that drive or perpetuate conflict?
- What value add can external actors have on partnerships across aid and peacebuilding?
- What role should donors and policymakers play to install equitable and meaningful partnerships?
Through this discussion, we hope to learn from real-life examples of good practices. We encourage participants to share their own experiences where possible. We acknowledge that many of these discussions will be difficult and uncomfortable, but they are critical if we are to re-shape peacebuilding to be something that achieves sustainable peace empowers local communities.
Register for the consultation using this link. Please forward this to anyone you think might be interested.
How will it work?
The conversations will take place on Peace Direct’s Platform4Dialogue online discussion platform. They will last two days, on 18-19th October.
While the consultation will be available in English and French, there will also be the opportunity for discussions to be held in Spanish and Arabic. Participants who speak Spanish and Arabic will be able to use the automatic translation function built into the discussion platform. A public report will be produced from this consultation. Those who are publicly quoted will be asked for consent.
There will also be specific live Zoom calls to supplement the online conversations. There will be the option to show interest in these additional conversations in the registration form.
If you have any questions about this consultation, please contact the Platform4Dialogue team at [email protected].
*Platform4Dialogue is an online text-based platform that allows participants to contribute at times most suitable to them. It is possible to fit participation around your usual commitments and various time-zones.