Mission Zhobia

WINNING THE PEACE

Imagine being sent to Zhobia, a country you never visited before, with a mission to develop the rule of law there. How will YOU maneuver through the complex socio-political environment? Will YOU be able to bring peace to Zhobia?

Purpose

Approximately 1.4 billion people live in countries that suffer from conflict and turmoil and peacebuilding remains one of the world’s biggest challenges.

Peacebuilding practitioners are well steeped in their technical field of expertise, but are much less well trained in maneuvering through complex socio-political realities.

This game serves as a safe space in which practitioners can practice their competencies in a virtual environment.
Click here to read more.

Objectives

Practitioners who are being deployed to conflict-affected settings require strong peacebuilding competencies to engage in a conflict-sensitive manner.

This game aims to teach the key competencies of conflict analysis, identifying stakeholder perspectives, building trust, engaging stakeholders, and adapting to unforeseen peacebuilding challenges.
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Experience

You will deploy to a fictitious country recently devastated by violent conflict, tasked with the important mission to strengthen the rule of law in the country.

You will need to take decisions on the location of a court house, the type of legal system to support, and the people to train.

You will face challenges such as low capacity of institutions; lack of trust by the population in the government; flare-up of conflict, and highly divergent perspectives on how justice can and should be delivered to the population.
Click here to read more.

Who can play the game?

The game is available to play for free online. The member organisations hope it will help those working in conflict-affected contexts to be better able to analyse the environment and to engage in a more conflict sensitive way. Members of the general public who are interested in understanding and navigating the challenges faced by working in a peacebuilding environment are invited to play the game too. Training institutes, who would like to use the game as part of their own training programs, are requested to contribute to covering the running costs of the game. If you wish to use Mission Zhobia as part of your training please contact the Consortium by clicking here to go to our contact form.

CONSORTIUM & PARTNERS

Initiated by the PeaceNexus Foundation, a consortium of international peacebuilding institutions came to together in August 2013 to think about an innovative approach to train essential peacebuilding competencies. They had all recognized that while international and national civilian and military professionals have sufficient technical knowledge in their area of specialization, they receive little training in how to adapt to unforeseen peacebuilding challenges. As games are an effective and entertaining way to train essential skills, these training institutes decided to join hands and develop build a web-based game, which they will use in their core training programs. You can read more about each of them by clicking here.

UNITAR

United Nations Institute for Training and Research

ACCORD

African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes

USIP

United States Institute for Peace

GCSP

Geneva Centre for Security Policy

PeaceNexus

&RANJ

Creative Industries Fund NL

PARTNER WITH US

Mission Zhobia was developed by major institutes that provide training to peacebuilding practitioners, with the aim to spread more widely the competencies necessary for engaging sensitively conflict-affected contexts.
For this reason, we make the game freely available for peacebuilding organisations and practitioners. Also members of the general populace who are interested in the realities of peacebuilding are invited to play the game for free.
There are costs to developing and hosting this game however. Any agencies, educational providers or other commercial organization interested in using Mission Zhobia as a learning tool are expected to license the game from the consortium, so that they contribute to the recurrent costs of the game. Those agencies are requested to contact us through our contact form.
As we really enjoyed developing this game, we are also open to partnering with others on developing new and exciting interactive content to advance peacebuilding. If you are interested, don't hesitate to contact us by clicking here to go to our contact form.

TESTIMONIALS

Mr. Oscar Fernandez-Taranco

Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support

“Mission Zhobia is a much-needed innovation to enhance peacebuilding skills among actors working in conflict-affected settings. Peacebuilding is an art and Mission Zhobia demonstrates that in many ways. The game simulates very realistic and common challenges of working in countries affected by conflict, such as rapidly changing political circumstances, low capacities, lack of trust and tense rivalries. I highly commend the PeaceNexus Foundation for taking this initiative and developing this tool with and its partners and I hope that many will start playing this game."

Dmitry Titov

Former Assistant Secretary-General for Rule of Law and Security Institutions, Department of Peacekeeping Operations, United Nations

"As a strong supporter of using innovative technology to facilitate continuous learning, I look forward to seeing this game fully developed and ready for action. It will help those in the peacebuilding community understand how, in real terms, we work to build strong rule of law institutions in conflict-affected countries."

Mika-Markus Leinonen

Former CIVCOM Chair, European External Action Service, European Union

“As the Chairman of the EU Committee for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management, I have always underlined the importance of training both the civilian experts to be deployed to our missions as well as the staff working at HQs in Brussels and the Capitals. I very much welcome the idea of this innovative concept and look forward to it being made available to the crisis management community soon.”