APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 50 50 AFRICA PEACE AND CONFLICT JOURNAL external peace efforts. Attention should be paid to local tensions and culture, which requires acceptance of a long-term time frame. The transformation-oriented approach therefore combines such activities as mediation or negotiation at the state level (Track I); problem-solving workshops and peace missions at the middle level (Track II); and a range of peace initiatives—for example, peace education, peace and human rights advocacy, local peace commissions, community dialogue projects, and trauma healing—at the grassroots level (Track III).40 The major innovation of the transformation-oriented school is its shift of focus from international to local actors, emphasizing civil society and ordinary citizens more so than do the resolution and complementary schools of thought. A peacebuilding process is doomed to failure if it focuses only on the macro level and neglects local tensions. Changes in legal and other institutions without psycho-cultural transformation are similarly futile.41 Analysis suggests that changes in institutions that manage conflicting interests and needs are most effective when they are closely associated with efforts to address macro as well as micro problems and engage psychocultural issues.42 Changes that go to the root of a conflict must be comprehensive in this sense, touching all levels of the society and all aspects of people’s relationships. As John Burton asserts, ‘a society is a totality, behavior anywhere affects behavior everywhere’.43 A denial at the local level, for example, through unemployment or lack of food, has the potential to spin into national and even international violence and crime. Local power struggles involving ethnic identity, corruption, and violence can produce national as well as provincial implications, such as creating flows of internally displaced persons or refugees that may have consequences that extend beyond the local arena. Tensions in the family, clan, municipality, province, or school can develop into violent behaviors years later.44 For social stability to emerge through change and peace requires public awareness about the sources of problems and a consensus approach to social solutions, which are fundamental to critical consciousness or peace education. The paradigm of critical consciousness has been defined as a ‘process of promoting the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values needed to bring about behavior changes that will enable children, youth and adults to prevent conflict and violence, both overt and structural; to resolve conflict peacefully; and to create the conditions conducive to peace, whether at an intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, national or international level’.45 40. Lederach, Building Peace. 41. Robert Bush and A. Baruch, ‘Realizing the potential of international conflict work: Connections between practice and theory’, Negotiation Journal, 19 (2003), 97–103. 42. J. Rudolph Rummel, ‘Dimensions of conflict behavior within and between nations’, General Systems Yearbook, 8 (1963), 1–50; Daniel Christie, Richard Wagner, and Deborah Winter, Peace, Conflict and Violence (Upper Saddle River, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 2001); Marc Howard Ross, Managing Conflict Constructively: Interests, Interpretations and Disputing in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993). 43. John Burton, Violence Explained: The Sources of Conflict, Violence and Crime and Their Prevention (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997), 140. 44. On the link between peacebuilding, local tensions, and education in war-ridden societies, see Gray Cox, The Ways of Peace: A Philosophy of Peace as Action (New York, Paulist Press, 1986); Séverine Autesserre, ‘Local violence, international indifference? Post-Conflict ‘settlement’ in the eastern D.R. Congo, 2003–2005’ (PhD diss., New York University, 2006). 45. Susan Fountain, ‘Peace education in UNICEF’, Working paper, UNICEF, New York, 1999, 1, www.unicef.org/education/files/PeaceEducation.pdf.