What We Are Learning This Week with Dr. Lara Olson

October 24, 2022 in POLI 502 Advanced Topics Seminar in Politics: Conflict, Intervention & Peace 

Dr. Lara Olson is exploring the local ownership agenda in international peacebuilding & the practice & scholarship aspiring to transform how international interventions support peace

 

Can you tell us a little more about this topic? 

For peacebuilding efforts to work, they must be designed and “owned” by local people embedded in the affected society. Much research has shown that peacebuilding missions (Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and others) have ended wars but failed to build sustainable peace. Instead, top-down, donor driven solutions often fuel externally dependent national elites and create fragile democratic structures that perform poorly—and reduce space for locally legitimate actors, practices and politics. The local ownership agenda to change this has become a major policy goal of international NGOs, UN structures and other peacebuilding actors but there has been far less progress on practical ways to achieve it.     

 

What else do you cover in your course? 

The course covers the evolution of international interventions for peace in the internal/civil wars in the post-Cold war era in terms of the guiding concepts, institutions and practical policies. It fuses scholarship and lessons from peacebuilding practice and exposes senior students in Poli Sci to the main discourses of both. As well, it critically examines causes of such civil wars and the successes, failures and challenges of various forms of international engagement to create self-sustaining, legitimate governance structures that can sustain peace once the international intervention exits. Finally, it examines prevailing thinking on how to measure the “success” of these international missions. 

How did you come to develop this course? 

I have worked for decades with peacebuilding organizations on the research, evaluation and implementation side as well as having recently completed a mid-career doctorate on civil society peacebuilding and violence prevention. That involved a deep dive into the academic debates, and how intertwined these two areas of theory and practice are as ‘coal face’ critiques by practitioners have been picked up and developed in the academic domain, and vice versa. I teach the course in a way that highlights the huge contributions an active exchange between practice and theory has made in the evolution of the best tools we have to build peace—which still need much improvement! 

Finally, what other courses would you recommend for students interested this topic? 

At UCalgary, there are several related undergraduate courses in Political Science at the upper level, namely POLI 470 Genocide, POLI 487 International Organizations, and POLI 543 Law and Armed Conflict. As well since peacebuilding interventions are part of broader development and international aid approaches, courses in the UCalgary’s Development Studies program may be of interest.  

 

Our Thanks to Dr. Lara Olson for sharing your course with us

Follow Dr. Olson at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lara-olson-62157b25/?originalSubdomain=ca