Peace by Piece learning to stabilise a military conflict with a strategic game

The book is divided into three main sections. The initial section lays out a detailed plan for research and implementation. It begins by exploring the motivation that fueled our scientific interest and led us to develop a project focused on stabilizing armed conflicts through the creation of a strategic simulation game. In this section, we detail the process of conceptualizing the idea and testing our initial hypotheses. Following this, the book provides a broad overview of the theoretical framework that underpinned our focused work, before bringing together the key components crucial for reconstructing a state after conflict into a cohesive concept. Additionally, this part includes a discussion on the history of Mali, serving as a practical example and analytical case study for testing our theoretical approaches.

The second section is the most comprehensive part of the book. It encompasses the results of our individual efforts, emphasizing the synthesis of theoretical insights from our respective fields to make them applicable to the development of the strategic game. Building on the theoretical foundation established through dialogue in the first section, we divide the work into different domains, each with its own in-depth study. This section effectively summarizes distinct analyses concerning the political, military, economic, and social aspects of peacebuilding processes. We also highlight the significance of information and infrastructure in the (re)construction of a state.

In the final section, the theoretical discussions are integrated with a strategic board game, demonstrating the practical application of the theories discussed earlier. This part describes the outcomes of the game and provides a reflective analysis of the project as a whole. It reveals our findings from the gameplay and insights drawn from observing participant behavior. We've attempted to pose sub-questions that, while not fully developed as research questions, aim to explore how the game could be used to address uncertainties identified during our theoretical work. We view both the book and the game as an ongoing project.