Community Operational Research: Developing a systemic peace education programme involving urban and rural communities in Colombia

This paper describes a Community Operational Research inquiry in which members of diverse local and marginalised communities, working with external researchers, created a peace programme that was implemented in more than four hundred and fifty local schools. It has disseminated a culture of peace in a social context characterised by high levels of violence. Diverse systemic problem structuring methods were used throughout the development of the programme. The creative design of methods guided the research and contributed to develop an evolving, participative multimethodology that mixes methods and tools from the qualitative/quantitative spectrum, including interactive planning, critical systems heuristics, soft systems methodology, statistics, and methods from the conflict resolution field. The peace programme was initially designed using a synergy of problem structuring methods, and several tools and methods were used thereafter to improve the programme as its contexts evolved. Community operational research and systems thinking have had an impact on the programme since its initial stages, and have contributed to modify it based on well-grounded quantitative and qualitative information. This programme has reached more than a million people in Colombian society, and has been internationally recognised as one of the most innovative and impacting experiences for Latin American social development. It has created a culture of peace in hundreds of schools, having transformative effects on the individuals as well as on their social relations. Moreover, the impact of the programme has transcended the schools’ boundaries and has spread to wider circles of society.