Transforming conflicts and building peace: Experience and ideas of Swedish Civil Society Organisations

Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been a movement towards focusing attention on the role of civil society in armed conflicts. Firstly, ever since then there has been a new sense of awareness and a general understanding that most of the armed conflicts in the world are intrastate. Secondly, the narrow security agenda of the Cold War was replaced by an extended concept of security that took into account threats against the life and health of people, for example in the form of environmental degradation, famine disasters, extensive violations of human rights, and terrorism. Thirdly, in connection with the armed conflicts of the 1990s, new conclusions were reached on the role of ethnicity and religion (identity factors) in conflicts. Fourthly, new findings were produced in peace research on the relationship between democracy and peace. Fifthly, actions taken in this process began to focus more on greater involvement by civil society, for example truth and reconciliation processes that had the broad support of the people. Moreover, civil components have been stronger in the new generation of multi-functional operations under the auspices of the United Nations. These multi-functional operations were larger and more complex, and therefore had more points of contact with local civil societies. Also, with an extended mandate, there was a need of more civil employees. In this situation an ever-increasing number of civil society organisations (CSOs) discovered that they could play a role in contributing to peaceful development. Among Swedish CSOs active in areas of crisis and conflict, a need arose to describe and give careful consideration to this development in order to improve their capacity to act for peace. Several organisations that were working together in a network, the Peace Team Forum, joined forces and formulated terms of reference for a study that was made over a period of two years - September 1999 - September 2000 - with finance provided by Sida. Fifty-eight Swedish CSPs participated. These organisations included churches, development cooperation organisations, peace associations, humanitarian organisations, human rights organisations, youth organisations, solidarity organisations, adult education