Levels of Peace Building: Top, Middle, and Grass-root Approaches

Why do so many ceasefires collapse within months, while some quiet, unglamorous community efforts manage to hold communities together for decades? The answer often lies in who is doing the peace building and at what level of society. Peace is rarely built by a single handshake between two leaders. It is built across multiple layers of a society at once, from presidents and rebel commanders at the top, to community elders and grassroots volunteers at the bottom. The most widely used framework for understanding this layered reality is the peace building pyramid developed by John Paul Lederach, who divided the work of peace into three levels: the top, the middle, and the grass-root. This post unpacks each level, explains what kind of work happens there, and shows why no single level can deliver lasting peace on its own.

The peace building pyramid: a quick map 🔗

Lederach introduced his model in the 1997 book Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, and it remains one of the most taught frameworks in conflict resolution today. He pictured the actors in any conflict as a pyramid with three layers. The top is narrow because it contains very few people. The base is wide because it contains the bulk of the affected population. As the framework explains, the top-level elite represents the fewest people, sometimes just a handful of key actors, while the grassroots level involves the largest number and best represents the population at large.

The central insight is simple but powerful: each level has different leaders, different resources, different constraints, and therefore needs a different approach to building peace. A strategy that works for heads of state will not work for refugee camp volunteers, and vice versa. Understanding who acts at each level, and what actions suit that level, is the key to designing a complete peace process.

The top level: high-profile leaders and high-stakes diplomacy 🔗

The top of the pyramid is occupied by the most visible figures in a conflict, including political, military, and sometimes religious leaders. These are the people the public thinks of when asked, “Who leads the government?” or “Who leads the opposition?” Their defining features are high visibility, power, and influence, and they are usually backed by established hierarchical structures.

This visibility is both a strength and a trap. Top-level actors can command attention, mobilise state resources, and sign binding agreements such as ceasefires and treaties. But because they operate in full public view, they must constantly project an image of strength. This makes it politically risky for them to accept anything less than the goals they have publicly promised their followers. As a result, top-level peace work tends to focus first on a cease-fire or cessation of hostilities, a concrete first step that can open the door to later negotiations.

What top-level peace building looks like 🔗

This is the world of formal, official diplomacy, often called track one diplomacy. It involves negotiations between governments and high-level mediators, sometimes with international actors facilitating dialogue. The United States Institute of Peace describes track one as the traditional image of diplomacy: two parties sitting at a table to negotiate an official agreement, engaging participants who range from policymakers to heads of state.

In the Indian context, the long-running Naga peace negotiations illustrate this level well. The formal talks between the Government of India and insurgent organisations such as the National Socialist Council of Nagaland represent classic top-level peacemaking, involving official representatives, ceasefire terms, and politically binding frameworks. Yet the decades-long, on-and-off nature of these talks also reveals the limits of relying on the top alone.

The weakness of working only at the top 🔗

Top leaders rarely experience the daily reality of conflict themselves. The violence, displacement, and fear are felt most acutely by ordinary people at the base, not by elites in negotiating rooms. An agreement signed at the top can therefore feel distant or even illegitimate to communities on the ground. If the population does not feel ownership of the deal, the peace it promises tends to be fragile. This is precisely why the other two levels matter.

The middle level: the connectors who hold the process together 🔗

The middle-range is, in Lederach’s view, the most strategically important and most underused layer. It is occupied by leaders who are highly respected but not at the very top of the power hierarchy. Think of respected heads of business, education, agriculture, and health, along with influential academics, religious figures of regional standing, and heads of well-known civil society organisations.

What makes these actors so valuable is their dual connection. As the framework notes, middle-range leaders are likely to know and be known by the top leadership, while at the same time maintaining significant ties to the grassroots constituency that top leaders claim to represent. They sit in the middle of the web, linking the elite negotiating table to the lived experience of ordinary people.

Why lower visibility is an advantage 🔗

Because middle-range leaders are less in the public spotlight than top leaders, they enjoy something elites lack: freedom to manoeuvre. They are not bound by public ultimatums, so they can explore compromises and build relationships without the political cost of appearing to “back down.” This is why Lederach called this a “middle-out” approach. It is based on the idea that this layer contains leaders who, if engaged properly, can radiate peace influence both upward toward the elite and downward toward the masses.

What middle-level peace building looks like 🔗

The signature activity at this level is the problem-solving workshop, sometimes called interactive problem solving. Here, mid-level people from opposing sides sit down together to examine the underlying human needs of each side and search for ways those needs can be met simultaneously. As the conflict resolution literature explains, these discussions are grounded in the real needs visible at the bottom of society, and they often produce creative breakthroughs that are simply not possible in the glare of high-level negotiations.

Other middle-level activities include conflict resolution training, the formation of peace commissions, and the building of “insider-partial” teams of trusted local mediators. This kind of unofficial, non-governmental engagement is often described as track two diplomacy, the realm of professional non-state actors who analyse, prevent, and manage conflicts outside official channels. Because participants are closer to the violence than elites but more flexible than officials, track two work can quietly lay the groundwork for productive formal talks later.

The grass-root level: meeting immediate needs and healing communities 🔗

The base of the pyramid is the widest layer because it represents the masses of people directly affected by conflict. Grassroots leaders work in direct connection with these communities and include local community leaders, heads of indigenous NGOs, community development workers, local health and education officials, and refugee camp leaders.

For Lederach, the defining feature of grassroots reality is survival. He wrote that, during a conflict, life for the majority of people at this level is dominated by day-to-day problems, even the fundamental struggle to find the food, water, and shelter needed to stay alive. Grassroots leaders have something elites can never have: direct personal experience of the hostilities, daily witness to the prejudice and discrimination driving the conflict, and the trust of the people who live inside it.

What grass-root peace building looks like 🔗

Peace building at this level begins with immediate needs. Providing food, shelter, medical aid, and trauma support to victims is itself a form of peace work, because a population in survival mode cannot invest in reconciliation. Beyond relief, grassroots work involves community dialogue, local reconciliation between neighbours, psychosocial healing, and rebuilding the everyday relationships that violence has torn apart.

A striking Indian example is the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA), formed by women in Kohima in 1984. When fratricidal killings between Naga factions intensified, the NMA launched its powerful “Shed No More Blood” campaign, initiating dialogue and negotiation with various underground groups. During periods when fear gripped society and no one would step forward to claim the bodies of the slain, NMA members covered them in traditional Naga shawls as per custom, an act of grief, dignity, and quiet courage. This is grassroots peace building at its most authentic, rooted in the lived experience and moral authority of ordinary people.

Another example is the work of Gandhian volunteers such as Natwarbhai Thakkar, who established the Nagaland Gandhi Ashram in Chuchuyimlang village in 1955 to promote integration and development through voluntary service. Over decades, such patient, on-the-ground work in education and community building helped nurture the slow emergence of civil society in the region.

The weakness of working only at the grassroots 🔗

For all its authenticity, grassroots work has a clear limit: scale. Local actors usually represent more than just themselves, but they lack ties to higher levels of organisation and cannot deliver a national settlement. A village can make peace with its neighbour, but it cannot disarm an army or repeal a law. Without support and structure from above, grassroots gains remain fragile and localised.

Why the three levels need each other 🔗

The most important lesson of the pyramid is that the three levels are complementary, not competing. Each compensates for the others’ weaknesses. The top level can deliver binding agreements but lacks ground-level legitimacy. The grassroots level has legitimacy and lived experience but lacks reach. The middle level connects the two, translating elite agreements into community trust and channelling community needs into elite negotiations.

This is the logic behind multi-track diplomacy, a systems approach that treats peacemaking as a living web of interconnected activities rather than a single event. The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy and scholars in the field argue that deep-rooted conflicts cannot be left to governments alone but must engage non-governmental actors, civil society, and informal channels working together. The Oslo Accords are a famous example of this interaction: talks that began as unofficial track two dialogue eventually transitioned into formal track one diplomacy by the time they concluded.

Northeast India shows the same principle. Scholars studying the region distinguish between the “official” peace process, between the Government of India and insurgent organisations, and the “unofficial” peace processes at the local level that make day-to-day coexistence possible despite continuing violence. As one study notes, civil society groups help bring warring parties to the negotiating table and suggest workable settlement terms, performing exactly the connecting role Lederach assigned to the middle and grassroots layers. When the NMA met with student organisations, media, and other civil society bodies during its “journey of conscience,” it was deliberately widening the peace process beyond the four walls of official talks, insisting that all stakeholders be involved.

Designing a complete peace strategy 🔗

A genuinely durable peace process therefore works on all three levels at once. Elites negotiate the formal framework and ceasefire. Middle-range leaders run problem-solving workshops, train mediators, and form peace commissions that link the negotiating table to communities. Grassroots actors meet survival needs, heal relationships, and build the popular legitimacy that makes any agreement stick. Pull out any one layer and the structure weakens. Build all three together, and peace acquires the depth it needs to survive setbacks.

What do you think? If you had to strengthen peace building in a conflict-affected region in India today, which level of the pyramid would you invest in first, and why? And do you think the middle-range leaders Lederach considered so crucial are given enough attention in the peace processes you have read about?

References

1. https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/hierarchical_intervention_levels
2. https://www.beyondintractability.org/bksum/building-lederach
3. https://www.usip.org/publications/2019/07/primer-multi-track-diplomacy-how-does-it-work
4. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/lady-shri-ram-college-for-women/peace-and-conflict-resolution/actors-and-approaches-lederach/50660633
5. https://www.beyondintractability.org/moos/lederach-pyramid
6. https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/multi-track_diplomacy
7. https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/publications/giga-focus/development-peacebuilding-and-women-s-agency-in-northeast-india
8. https://feminisminindia.com/2022/04/05/naga-mothers-association-the-role-of-the-mothers-of-nagaland-in-peace-keeping/
9. https://villagesquare.in/fifty-years-peace-building-efforts-nagaland/
10. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/3500