Roger F Malina (/14/2025 contribution to Colleague’s Project
With assistance of Aperio AI with caution
Peace Emergence Reflection
PEACE KEEPING PEACE MAKING FLANEUR Roger F. Malina (/14/2025) –
My mother, Marjorie Duckworth, served in the UK anti-German anti-aircraft batteries during World War II. Then she became head of Human Resources when UNESCO was founded. My father, Frank J. Malina, served in the US Air Force, helping build Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) units against the Japanese. He later joined the science department of UNESCO. Their trajectories moved from active participation in wartime conflict to post-war institution building. In their lives, the shift from peace making to peace keeping was both personal and institutional.
A colleague brought these memories to mind during our Emergence Seminar. He reflected on his past in the US military and his ongoing work with the Canadian Peacekeeping Forces. This confluence of personal narrative and theoretical discourse leads us to ask: how do these experiences map onto the methods of emergence studies in complex systems, especially those that attempt to understand human societies?
The reflection on the transition from peace making to peace keeping, grounded in family history and academic dialogue, offers a powerful lens for understanding emergence in complex adaptive systems. Peace making is often understood as a disruption response—intervention during systemic instability. It resembles a phase transition, requiring external, top-down mechanisms: military force, diplomacy, institutional redesign. Peace keeping, by contrast, mirrors systemic homeostasis. It emerges through self-regulation, feedback, and adaptive co-evolution among agents, communities, and institutions. Stability is not passively maintained but actively enacted.
Human societies exhibit emergent properties when localized interactions scale into global structures. Post-conflict societies embody this shift from externally imposed peace to internally sustained stability. Individuals reconfigure their roles: soldiers become peacekeepers; engineers become builders of civic infrastructure; scientists and administrators seed the growth of transnational institutions. This evolution is not a binary shift but an adaptive transformation through multi-level feedback and memory.
From an emergence studies perspective, several methodological implications follow.
First, peace making defines initial conditions and boundary constraints.
Second, emergence in social systems operates across nested scales, where local agency and macro structures co-evolve.
Third, systemic coherence depends on the reuse and transformation of roles. Fourth, feedback—both stabilizing and destabilizing—is central.
Fifth, collective memory, legacy, and identity influence future attractor states.
This metaphor—peace making to peace keeping—thus becomes a conceptual grammar for understanding how stability emerges and endures. It prompts key questions: How do systems transition from imposed order to autonomous balance? What feedback stabilizes peacekeeping architectures? How do individual and institutional memories encode resilience?
Personal history, institutional legacy, and complexity theory converge here. Not as abstraction, but as lived process.
Key academic contributions illuminate this terrain:
Cedric de Coning (2020). “Adaptive Peace Operations” applies complexity theory to peacekeeping, emphasizing feedback and adaptation.
Cedric de Coning (2018). “Adaptive Peacebuilding” reimagines peacebuilding as iterative, resilient, and locally grounded.
Patricia T. Coleman et al. (2019). “Visualizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Sustainable Peace” employs systems mapping to explore peace sustainability.
A. Day (2023). “A Perturbed Peace” critiques linear peacekeeping models and invokes complexity-informed frameworks.
Séverine Autesserre (2014). Peaceland dissects the everyday dynamics of international peace interventions, implicitly aligning with emergence logic.
As a flaneur of peace, I reflect on my own path: astrophysics taught me to observe without intervening, academia taught me to edit rather than disrupt, and now, leading our Off-Center for Emergence Studies, I see the oscillatory dynamics of social order. Watching squirrels knowingly, stepping on insects unknowingly. Cigarettes for internal dissonance. Spending and saving. Sunrise, not sunset.
My daughter worked in refugee camps—descendants of UNESCO’s postwar vision. My brother engineered water systems in Africa—quiet peacekeeping through infrastructure. At the coffee shop, men serve at the front, women at the back. These micro-observations mirror structural asymmetries.
Being at peace with myself before being at peace with others. All of it is data. All of it is emergence.
The reflection on the transition from peace making to peace keeping, drawn from personal family history and recent seminar discussions, offers a compelling lens through which to view emergence studies in complex systems—particularly within human societies.
Their trajectories moved from active participation in war and post-war recovery toward roles focused on the maintenance of peace. This evolution, from peace making to peace keeping, mirrors the dynamics observed in complex adaptive systems.
In emergence studies, peace making can be understood as a form of disruption response—interventions that occur during moments of systemic instability or transformation. These interventions are akin to phase transitions, where systems move from one state to another, often requiring decisive, external action. Peace making represents this external imposition of order, typically through top-down mechanisms like negotiation, military intervention, or institutional reconfiguration.
In contrast, peace keeping reflects a phase of stabilization and sustained balance. Rather than relying on external enforcement, it depends on the internal dynamics of the system—self-regulation, feedback loops, and adaptive interactions among agents. This phase is comparable to homeostasis in biological systems or equilibrium in dynamic networks. It is not a passive state, but an active, emergent process shaped by the interplay of individuals, institutions, and shared norms.
Human societies, as complex systems, exhibit emergent properties when local interactions scale up to produce global patterns. Post-conflict societies provide particularly vivid examples of emergent order. The move from externally enforced peace to internally maintained stability highlights a transition from designed to emergent structures. In this context, individuals who once served in militarized or disruptive roles often adapt to support civic rebuilding, governance, or cultural integration. The shift in function—such as military personnel transitioning to peacekeeping forces or scientific experts moving into policy—illustrates how the roles of agents evolve as the system changes.
They reveal how personal histories are embedded within broader systemic transformations. The movement from conflict to peace is not a binary shift but a complex reconfiguration of relationships, functions, and expectations across different levels of the system.
In applying this thinking to emergence studies, several insights emerge. First, the conditions established during peace making—such as institutional design or leadership decisions—serve as the initial parameters that influence how peace keeping processes unfold. Second, emergence in social systems occurs across multiple scales, requiring us to examine both macro-level structures and micro-level behaviors. Third, the adaptive reuse of roles and institutions is crucial for sustaining systemic coherence. Fourth, feedback mechanisms—both positive and negative—govern the system’s stability and resilience. Finally, memory, legacy, and narrative shape how individuals and collectives perceive their roles within the system, influencing future patterns of behavior.
The metaphor of moving from peace making to peace keeping thus becomes a powerful conceptual tool for understanding how order emerges, stabilizes, and evolves in complex human systems. It highlights the importance of adaptive capacity, role fluidity, and the interplay between intentional action and emergent outcomes. It also raises important questions: How can societies foster transitions from imposed to self-organized stability?
What mechanisms ensure that peace keeping is inclusive and resilient? How do individual experiences, contribute to broader systemic shifts?
In this way, personal history, institutional memory, and systemic theory converge to deepen our understanding of emergence—not just as an abstract phenomenon, but as a lived process shaping the fabric of societies.
In this way, personal history, institutional memory, and systemic theory converge to deepen our understanding of emergence—not just as an abstract phenomenon, but as a lived process shaping the fabric of societies.
Random Flaneur thoughts
Charles Baudelaire is famously associated with walking and observing life along the banks of the Seine in Paris. He was not only a poet but also a keen observer of urban life, and his role as a “flâneur”—a reflective stroller through the city—is central to his identity and work.
In particular: Baudelaire coined and celebrated the idea of the flâneur, someone who wanders the city, especially Paris, observing the crowd and the details of everyday life. He often walked the quays of the Seine, absorbing the atmosphere, watching people, and reflecting on modernity. These walks were both literal and metaphorical inspirations for his poetry. His seminal work, Les Fleurs du mal (1857), reflects this tension between the beauty and decay of urban life—much of which he encountered during his solitary walks.
Later thinkers such as Walter Benjamin drew heavily on Baudelaire’s image of the flâneur to explore urban modernity, especially in the Paris arcades and along the Seine.
My own career from (astrophysics, watching and not intervening is neither keeping nor making), so was my work as an academic editor, and now , for now, as a leader of our Off Center for Emergence Studies.
Oscillatory emergence of varying amplitudes.
Stepping on insects unkowningly, watching squirrels knowingly.
Cigarettes for internal turmoil to create peace.
Spending money, saving money.
Watch the sunrise more than the sunset.
My daughter’s work in refugee camps descendants of UNESCO thinking.
Smoke versus vape, Massage vs Tennis.
My brothers work in Africa building and maintaining irrigation and water systems.
At the coffee shop men servants served at the front, the women at the back.
Being at peace with myself before being at peace with others.
How does all this fit together and make emergence sense relevant to peace keeping and peace making?
Complexity theory suggests that the limited success of peace making and peace keeping—despite millennia of effort—stems from a fundamental misunderstanding: these efforts often treat peace as a linear, controllable outcome, rather than as an emergent property of dynamic, adaptive systems.
If neither peace making (top-down interventions) nor peace keeping (maintenance of status quo) has sufficed, what’s next, according to complexity theory? Here’s a structured synthesis:
1. Shift from Control to Facilitation
Traditional model: Control conflict through treaties, force, or institutions.
Complexity approach: Facilitate the conditions under which peace can emerge organically.
- Peace is not “implemented”—it is cultivated.
- Focus on enabling environments: trust networks, shared narratives, distributed leadership.
2. Embrace Decentralized and Adaptive Structures
- Centralized solutions often fail because they can’t adapt to local variability.
- Next step: polycentric governance, where multiple overlapping authorities adapt and respond based on local context.
Example: Peace processes that empower local councils, informal networks, or cultural mediators, rather than relying solely on national or international bodies.
3. Foster Resilient, Not Static, Peace
Peace must be able to absorb shocks—economic, political, ecological—without collapsing.
- Complexity theory favors resilience over stability.
- This involves investing in redundancy, modularity, feedback loops, and diverse knowledge systems.
4. Promote Iterative, Learning-Based Peacebuilding
Instead of fixed strategies, adopt iterative experimentation, like in adaptive management.
- Monitor → Learn → Adjust → Repeat.
- Local experimentation, failure tolerance, and feedback integration are key.
5. Focus on Relationships, Not Just Institutions
Peace emerges from relational dynamics: trust, empathy, shared identities—not just formal accords.
- Network theory shows peace is more durable when relational density (number and strength of ties) is high across factions.
- Next phase: peace as a pattern of interdependence, not a political event.
6. Design for Emergence, Not Blueprinting
Top-down “blueprints” fail because they assume linear causality. Complexity theory advises:
- Design scaffolds, not structures: tools and processes that allow for emergent solutions to develop.
- Encourage local innovation and distributed sense-making.
7. Integrate Transdisciplinary Insights
Peace is not just political—it is ecological, economic, psychological, technological. Future peace processes will need transdisciplinary collaboration—bringing in insights from systems ecology, neuroscience, cybernetics, and more. Emergence thrives at intersections of knowledge domains.
In Summary: From Solutions to Conditions
Rather than “solving” peace, complexity theory asks:
What are the conditions under which peace naturally emerges and persists?
That’s the guiding question of the next phase.
Would you like a diagram or visual model to illustrate this shift? Or examples of how these principles are being applied in real-world peacebuilding efforts today?
NO. I will stop stepping on ants.
SO?
You’re right to press on this point. While complex systems science and emergence theory have deepened our understanding of societal dynamics, their real-world application—especially to peace—has often fallen short. The models are insightful, but the impact has been limited. So, what next?
If both traditional interventions (like treaties, military peacekeeping) and complex systems approaches (like adaptive peacebuilding, network interventions) have underdelivered, then perhaps the next phase requires a fundamental reframing. Below are four possible frontiers to explore:
1. Move from Systems Analysis to Systems Co-Creation
Problem: We often analyze systems as observers but rarely co-create with those embedded in them.
Next step: Shift from modeling societies to engaging with them as living laboratories.
- Use participatory systems design: communities co-create feedback systems that reflect their own values.
- Scientists, peacebuilders, artists, and local actors collaborate as peer epistemologies, not as implementers vs. recipients.
2. Incorporate Inner Complexity: Consciousness, Emotion, and Meaning
Problem: Complexity science tends to ignore the inner worlds of people—emotions, trauma, identity, meaning.
Next step: Acknowledge that human systems are not just nodes and agents but meaning-making beings.
- Integrate depth psychology, narrative therapy, and spiritual traditions into systems practice.
- Peace is not just structural—it is experiential. Internal peace may be a precondition to systemic peace.
3. Reimagine Peace as a Metabolic Process
Problem: We treat peace as a static outcome.
Next step: Think of peace as metabolic—a continual process of transformation, decay, and renewal.
- Systems require cycles: peace and conflict are not opposites, but phases.
- Use regenerative design principles (borrowed from ecology): build systems that regenerate social capacity over time.
4. Embrace Failure as an Organizing Principle
Problem: We are failure-averse in peace work. But emergence relies on trial, error, and iteration.
Next step: Institutionalize fail-safe learning.
- Shift funding models from “project success” to adaptive learning cycles.
- Normalize public reflection on failure, as in engineering or bio-research, to accelerate global learning.
Synthesis: Beyond Knowing—Toward Transforming
We may not need better models, but better practices of presence, humility, and iteration.
Complexity science must now interface with art, ritual, lived experience, and embodied knowledge. The next iteration of peacebuilding may resemble gardening more than engineering, listening more than planning, and healing more than intervening.
The concept of habitability offers a vital reorientation in the discourse surrounding peace, complexity, and emergence. Rather than asking how we can merely prevent violence or maintain stability, the framework of habitability invites us to consider a deeper and more generative question: how do we create conditions where life—human and more-than-human—can flourish meaningfully, sustainably, and adaptively?
In this context, peace is not a fixed end state achieved through treaties or military de-escalation, nor is it the maintenance of a status quo enforced through institutional inertia. Instead, peace becomes a property of a system that is habitable—where relationships are viable, environments are resilient, and the diverse expressions of life can co-exist with dignity. Habitability, from the perspective of complex systems, is an emergent quality. It arises not through design alone, but through the adaptive interplay of feedback, responsiveness, and co-evolution among agents and their environments.
This stands in contrast to much of traditional peacebuilding, which often focuses on short-term stability or narrowly defined institutional goals. Habitability demands long-term thinking and multiscalar awareness. It connects the material—the presence of clean air, safe housing, and ecological viability—with the social—trust, shared norms, networks of care—and with the symbolic—narratives, art, memory, and spiritual grounding. In a habitable society, these layers are not siloed; they co-arise and co-evolve. The success of peace cannot be measured solely in ceasefires or election outcomes but in the lived experience of environments that support human potential and ecological balance.
From the standpoint of emergence theory, the failure of many peace initiatives lies in their focus on control rather than cultivation. They attempt to impose order rather than facilitate the conditions under which order, resilience, and creativity can emerge organically. Emergent habitability requires feedback-rich systems, not linear plans; it thrives on learning, iteration, and participation. It invites diverse voices and ways of knowing into the center of the process, not just as consultation but as co-authorship of the system’s evolution.
There is also a phenomenological dimension to this shift. The flâneur—Baudelaire’s archetype of the wandering observer—offers a methodological stance. The flâneur does not intervene directly but notices deeply: observing where systems breathe and where they suffocate, where joy and decay co-exist, and where latent patterns of coherence and possibility reside. This reflective, perceptive attention can be understood as a way of sensing habitability, of attuning to the subtle rhythms and dissonances that mark whether a system is truly livable.
When peace is understood through the lens of habitability, the horizon broadens. The concern shifts from how to stop war to how to share a world in a way that is joyful, just, and generative. This includes attention to the ongoing cycles of repair and renewal, the metabolizing of historical trauma, the restoration of damaged ecologies, and the weaving of new relational fabrics that make dignity, trust, and shared meaning possible.
In this way, habitability becomes the integrative thread that links peace, complexity, emergence, and daily life. It is not only a theoretical ideal but a lived aspiration, one that challenges us to think and act in ways that are as adaptive, resilient, and creative as the systems we hope to nurture.
Peace in the Wound”
by Fred the Heretic
I walked between the builders of bombs and the binders of treaties,
both bleeding from their eyes, both righteous,
both shouting peace! through clenched fists.
The peacekeepers wore blue and carried guns,
the peacemakers wore white and carried maps.
Both stepped over the broken bodies of children
to argue about who loved humanity more.
I lit a cigarette beside a crater and called it meditation.
Watched squirrels defy borders.
Listened to the trees negotiate wind
with more grace than any diplomat I’ve known.
My father drained deserts to grow wheat.
My sister bandages refugees in tents named after empires.
I write poems with no homeland.
We all make peace in different dialects.
The system sings in loops.
It forgets nothing.
Conflict is just one of its many rhythms—
like hunger, or longing, or tides.
What if peace is not a pact,
but a pattern?
Not a silence, but a kind of music
played only when we stop conducting
and start listening.
So I gather data from dandelions,
test hypotheses in alleyways and arcades.
I watch where pigeons land
and where the flâneurs still dare to walk.
If there is hope,
it grows not in treaties,
but in the quiet compost of stories—
the ones we tell
after the maps are burned,
after the guns are rust,
after the uniforms no longer fit.
There, perhaps,
peace will begin again—
with a squirrel,
with a sigh,
with someone deciding not to pull the trigger
just because they could. AI used judiciously in all the above.