To celebrate the fifth anniversary of PREP, Director Thomas Hill and Deputy Director Katerina Siira invited partners from Colombia and Libya to join a conversation on the global discourse on decolonization and localization. Malki Elkibir, the Peacebuilding Program Manager at Moomken in Libya, and Yessica Tatiana Motta Galindo, the VP of FUNRESURPAZ in Colombia, shared their insights and reflections on PREP’s largest and longest-running project to date: Municipal Leaders Building Peace: Understanding Locally-Led Impact in Conflict-Affected Countries.

Despite the decades-long discourse and global recognition for the need to localize and decolonize peacebuilding, human rights, and development work, a lot of what has been done is not effective, either perpetuating harm or not doing enough to mitigate the harmful legacies and structures of colonialism. For instance, Malik noted that while Libya has seen huge investment in the 12 years following the revolution, international donors haven’t asked what people need and are instead focusing on the wrong thing. International civil society and donors want to help Libya become a democracy, but they have neglected to think about or develop tools to prevent election violence that may happen during this transition. While the priority of local communities is to help Libyan people protect themselves from the violence surrounding the election, focusing on enhancing social cohesion to make communities strong, this has largely been overlooked by the international community. 

Yessica added her input on how participatory action research (PAR), an approach that is utilized by PREP and its partners, can help us to overcome the issues that Malik described. According to Yessica, PAR is “una metodología que apunta a la producción de un conocimiento propositivo y transformador mediante procesos de debate, de reflexión, y de construcción colectiva” – a methodology that aims at the production of purposeful and transformative knowledge through processes of debate, reflection, and collective construction. Through PAR, PREP and FUNRESURPAZ fully engages with the communities they are investigating, taking into account the realities of the community and the different views of all the local actors to allow for the possibility of “aprendizaje mutuo” – mutual learning –  that results in more effective interventions as well as the empowerment of the community. The purpose of this research is “se pone al servicio de la comunidad y con esto ayudará a resolver sus problemas y necesidades y por supuesto a poder planificar sus proyectos futuros,” – to put it at the service of the community and with this it will help to solve their problems and needs and of course to be able to plan their future projects. 

Finally, both Yessica and Malik reflected on the role of international partners, specifically universities, in localization and decolonization. Malik stated that “the role of the university now is to change the routine of our way of thinking,” and shared how Moomken’s partnership with PREP had introduced the organization to PAR and encouraged them to work with more diverse local actors, rather than actors they already knew, in order to create sustainable peace. Yessica shared that the key role of international university researchers is to embrace, engage, and comprehend the reality of each community so that they can start to transform and disrupt the power hierarchies together.

Rewatch this important conversation on Youtube.