Citizens’ Assemblies for Deliberative Peacebuilding: Advancing Democratic Capabilities

Post-conflict societies often face the challenge of building sustainable peace. Elite-led peace agreements, externally supervised elections, and technocratic reforms fall short when they fail to build trust, address historical injustices, and foreground the lived experiences of communities most deeply affected by the conflict. To address these deficiencies, scholars, peace advocates, and practitioners have increasingly turned to participatory and deliberative processes such as Citizens’ Assemblies to transform the process of post-conflict governance (Nakagawa, 2017; Steiner et al., 2017; Mundt, 2019). While celebrated for enhancing trust and legitimacy in public institutions, critics of Citizens’ Assemblies question their suitability in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Some argue they resemble other Global North-driven reform packages that are parachuted into local contexts; others that their design fails to account for the broader social and political conditions that shape participation. In some cases, they act as smokescreens for elite control, or serve as one-off projects without sustainable impacts. These risks are amplified in conflict-affected settings. At the same time, proponents of Citizens’ Assemblies suggest that they make an valuable contribution to democratic governance in fragile and conflict-affected settings by strengthening legitimacy and trust In this article, we utilize the concept of democratic capabilities (Parry, Escobar, Bua forthcoming) to conceptualise the peacebuilding potential of Citizens’ Assemblies in conflict-affected settings. Building on the Capabilities Approach to human development pioneered by Amartya Sen, we suggest that Citizens Assemblies may help develop democratic capabilities that are foundational for peacebuilding. Capabilities in this sense are the realistic opportunities that people have to able to be and to do the things they value. Developing relevant collective political capabilities (Williams 2004; Whitehead and Gray-Molina 2003; Ibrahim 2006) can provide a foundation for communities dealing with adversity to realise effective political action (Hoyos-Valdés 2025). Using illustrative examples from Bosnia i Herzegovina and Ukraine, we show how participation in CAs can develop specific democratic capabilities such as building community, collective care, and self-determination that, in conflict-affected settings, help build the conditions necessary for sustainable peace.