Vertical Integration: A Dynamic Practice Promoting Transformative Peacebuilding

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Notes

¹ Lederach (1997) writes about the need to build peace from the bottom-up, top-down and middle-out, presenting his famous ‘pyramid of peacebuilding actors’ which underlies the importance of linking action at top, middle and grassroots – with the middle playing a key bridging role. In The Moral Imagination (2005) he writes about vertical and horizontal integration, departing from the period's strong emphasis on formal, top-down processes of statebuilding.

² As proposed by Lederach (1997, xvi), effective peacebuilding requires establishing an infrastructure across different levels of society that empowers capacities for peace within that society and maximises external contributions. This idea has been taken up by a host of scholars and practitioners globally, and major institutions such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are actively working to operationalise the concept.

³ As illustrated in the report by the United Nations Secretary-General on enhancing mediation and its support activities (United Nations 2009).

⁴ The OECD-DAC led this movement at the policy level. See for example, OECD-DAC (2008, 1).

⁵ Writing about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, Severine Autesserre (2009) has explored how local agendas sustain national-level conflict, and how international intervention seemed either unable or unwilling to engage constructively with ‘the local’, in large part because the discursive frames used by outsiders privileged national-level actors and dynamics.

⁶ The development of ‘Second Generation DDR’ approaches reflects this (see McCandless 2009), as do discussions around non-state and competing sources of legitimacy (e.g. McCandless 2014).