COMMUNITY BASED PEACE PROGRAMS FOR ARMED CONFLICT RESOLUTION: A Guide to Program Development

People must protect themselves and their communities from structural violence by learning to address and resolve violent conflicts through nonviolent means. Peace programs in practice today do not equip communities to resolve ongoing conflicts of structural violence through nonviolent means. A critical gap exists between programs which try to build cultures of peace in development or recovery settings and programs which try to end ongoing armed conflict. A review of these programs and general peace research yields an understanding of best practices and ideas on how to create a community based program to resolve an ongoing armed conflict. Niger is used as a casestudy on how to incorporate the learned best practices into an actual program. Reflecting on the developed program for Niger offers the opportunity to discuss overall the best strategies and potential difficulties in creating peace programs to empower communities in times of armed conflict to prevent and address structural violence. This paper concludes that such programs are feasible and very much needed today