Explore our publications, from research papers and series to educational materials, covering all aspects of conflict transformation and peace promotion.
Lebanon has faced a succession of overlapping crises—including the 2019 financial collapse, the Beirut port explosion, institutional paralysis, recurring Israeli aggressions, and ongoing political and regional instability—that have profoundly reshaped state–citizen relations and intensified long-standing governance challenges. Against this backdrop, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, and the Berghof Foundation conducted research from March–December 2025 to examine how diverse groups of Lebanese citizens understand the current social contract, their priorities for a renewed and inclusive one, and the barriers and opportunities for achieving it.
Year2026
Author(s)Lara Azzam, Mohammad Al Mishlawi, Jana Sleem
واجه لبنان سلسلة من الأزمات المتداخلة، بما في ذلك الانهيار المالي عام 2019، وانفجار مرفأ بيروت، والشلل المؤسسي، والاعتداءات الإسرائيلية المتكررة، وعدم الاستقرار السياسي والإقليمي المستمر، والتي أعادت تشكيل العلاقات بين الدولة والمواطنين بشكل جذري، وزادت من حدة تحديات الحوكمة المزمنة. في هذا السياق، أجرت مؤسسة وستمنستر للديمقراطية ومؤسسة بيرغوف بحثًا خلال الفترة من مارس إلى ديسمبر 2025 لدراسة كيفية فهم فئات متنوعة من المواطنين اللبنانيين للعقد الاجتماعي الحالي، وأولوياتهم لعقد متجدد وشامل، والعوائق والفرص المتاحة لتحقيقه.
Year2026
Author(s)Lara Azzam, Mohammad Al Mishlawi, Jana Sleem
As environmental pressures intensify across many conflict-affected regions, they are increasingly shaping both the drivers of conflict and opportunities for peace. Drawing on lessons from Yemen, this policy brief examines how environmental challenges can serve as entry points for dialogue and cooperation, and highlights their relevance for peacebuilding, mediation, and post-conflict recovery.
In the face of rapidly escalating but unevenly distributed harms, global climate governance is struggling to prevent catastrophic warming while addressing growing demands for climate justice. This paper proposes transformative transitional justice as a lens through which to identify two sources of climate justice action: elements of justice latent within climate policy architectures, and community justice actions too often overlooked by formal institutions. It identifies ways to connect these institutional and community-level elements into a broader, multi-level justice ecosystem.
This paper explores the intersection of climate justice and transitional justice through the case study of community-level engagements with climate change in the rural area of Nkhulambe, Malawi. It shows that residents have developed their own climate responses that tackle more fully the manifold climate harms they have experienced than top-down climate responses to date. These community-led measures address climate harms which occurred in the past, while building solidarity in the present, in order to prevent and reduce the harms of future climate events, as such they can be understood as climate-focused transformative transitional justice in practice. Moreover, they have the potential to complement and strengthen top-down national and international efforts, making them more inclusive and responsive to communities affected by climate harms, as well as opening the door to more equitable climate action.
This paper explores the intersection of climate justice and transitional justice through the case study of community-level climate initiatives in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), Philippines. It identifies community-led climate actions that fuse transitional justice elements of truth-telling, reparative agency, and guarantees of non-recurrence in ways that challenge institutional silos between post-conflict and environmental governance. The findings demonstrate that addressing climate disasters in the BARMM is inseparable from resolving the historical land-based injustices and colonial displacement that created communal vulnerability. The study concludes that institutional frameworks must recognise and support community-led climate justice rather than displacing local agency with top-down technical solutions, and identifies the Bangsamoro Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Act of 2025 as a critical institutional opening for this integration.
The 2023 EEAS Peace Mediation Guidelines highlight the importance for mediators to engage with transitional justice frameworks. Experience shows that when transitional justice is sidelined as a purely post‑conflict issue, peace agreements often lack legitimacy and public acceptance. Sustainable peace therefore depends on addressing the legacy of past violence through appropriate transitional justice approaches.
This paper argues that transitional justice encompasses a wide range of judicial and non‑judicial mechanisms that, if carefully sequenced and contextually adapted, can be constructively integrated into peace mediation.
This study maps the provision of electricity, water and cleanliness services in five Yemeni cities. It highlights how the war has reshaped local systems, where they have proven resilient, and what is needed to restore a minimum functioning public service. It argues for addressing security and governance challenges affecting service provision, rebuilding a basic social contract with citizens, and foregrounding long-term sustainability against the temptation of quick fixes when investing into public service infrastructure and equipment.
تتناول هذه الدراسة واقع خدمات الكهرباء والمياه والنظافة في خمس مدن يمنية. كما تُبرز الدراسة أثر النزاع على أنماط تقديم الخدمات المحلية وتسلط الضوء على الجوانب التي أظهرت قدرة على الصمود، والعوامل اللازمة لضمان استمرارية الحد الأدنى من الخدمات العامة. كما تؤكد على أهمية معالجة التحديات المرتبطة بالأمن والحوكمة التي تؤثر على تقديم هذه الخدمات، والعمل على إعادة بناء الثقة بين الدولة والمجتمع، مع التركيز على تبني حلول مستدامة على المدى الطويل بدلاً من الاكتفاء بالمعالجات السريعة عند الاستثمار في البنية التحتية والتجهيزات الخدمية.
