Peacebuilding in Contemporary Africa

In Search of Alternative Strategies

Kenneth Omeje, Kenneth Omeje

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351031448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Peacebuilding in Contemporary Africa explores the challenges and opportunities faced by countries and societies transitioning from armed conflicts to peace in contemporary Africa. It evaluates the effectiveness, outcomes and failures of existing peacebuilding initiatives implemented by stakeholders, and proposes new strategies and approaches to facilitate the transition. The book investigates both micro- and macro-level conflicts in various parts of Africa, as well as the efforts made to resolve them and build peace. The book pays particular attention to grassroots-based micro-level conflicts often disregarded in peacebuilding literature, which tends to focus on macro-level, neo-liberal state reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts.

The book adopts an evidence-based, policy-relevant approach to peacebuilding in Africa. The various chapter contributors offer a lucid analysis and critique of some of the prevailing paradigms and strategies of peacebuilding practiced in Africa. Together, the authors recommend innovative strategies to mobilise and coordinate governance institutions and partnerships at all levels (international, regional, national, and local) to prevent conflict escalation in volatile states and advance the rebuilding of violence-affected states and communities.

Peacebuilding in Contemporary Africa provides a much-needed perspective from African scholars, and will be of interest to students, researchers, policy makers and practitioners with an interest in promoting legitimate policy interventions and sustainable peace in Africa.

PART I

Conceptual debate

1

INTRODUCTION

Peacebuilding in contemporary Africa

Kenneth Omeje

Introduction

This book is based around two core objectives. First, it aims to explore the challenges of countries and societies transiting from armed conflicts to peace with a view to evaluating the effectiveness, outcomes and failures of existing peacebuilding strategies implemented by stakeholders. Second, it aims to propose complementary innovative strategies of peacebuilding and conditions for their implementation to facilitate transition. Conceived as a contribution to the spate of literature on war-to-peace transition in Africa, the study is designed to interrogate the received wisdom, dominant paradigms, strategies and priorities in peacebuilding in conflict-affected countries and communities of Africa. Epistemological issues about the normative and empirical content, underlying interests and context-relevance of the peace hitherto built in African countries and communities affected by violent conflicts are also explored and evaluated.

This book is at the intersection of peacebuilding and governance policy research. Despite the growing interest in African peacebuilding research and policy interventions there seems to persist a skewed preoccupation of specialist scholars and practitioners with macro-level, neo-liberal state reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts in the aftermath of violent conflicts. As such, peacebuilding enterprises focused on grassroots-based micro-conflicts and inter-­community feuding within and between states are largely discountenanced while little or no efforts are made at imagining and pursuing peacebuilding outside the neo-liberal framework (Alimba 2013; Omeje 2015). Some of the chapter contributions comprised in this book have therefore explored innovative strategies for building peace in grassroots in-country and trans-border ethnic communities that have for far too long been neglected by mainstream peacebuilding research and policy interventions (e.g. the chapters by Afua Yakohene, Tony Karbo and Pamela Machakanja and Chupicai Manuel). Similarly, this book elucidates the issue of how governance, institutions and partnerships could be mobilised and coordinated at all levels (international, regional, national and local) to advance the reconstruction and rebuilding of conflict-affected states and communities.

Peacebuilding in Africa: The intellectual debate

In this introductory chapter, an attempt is made to interrogate and analyse some of the relevant issues that underlie peacebuilding conceptualisation, policies and practices in contemporary Africa. There are two key features of the literature on peacebuilding, especially in Africa and other developing regions. The first is that peacebuilding is essentially conceptualised as a post-conflict activity. Hence, because most of the world’s armed conflicts since the end of World War II have occurred in developing regions for reasons related to resource scarcity, distribution and governance defects, the concept of peacebuilding is largely reserved for and applied to the more restive developing countries and regions. Consequently, the concept is especially used to denote operations, activities and events designed to support peace in the aftermath of violent conflicts. Even in the conventional parlance and understanding of most regional and international organisations – including the African Union (AU), Africa’s regional economic communities (RECs) and the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (UNPC), the concept of peacebuilding is largely restricted to this limited context that refers to “the process of (re-)building societies emerging from conflict” (cf. OECD 2010; Curtis 2012, 1–3). The peculiar preoccupation with post-conflict environment makes proponents to broadly contextualise peacebuilding as involving a range of targeted measures to reduce the risk of relapse into conflict and solidify peace by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the foundation for sustainable peace and development (Boutros-Ghali 1992; UNSG Peacebuilding Policy Committee 2007; OECD 2010). This conceptualisation can be described as a minimalist approach. Modern post-conflict peacebuilding involves mobilisation of efforts and resources to rebuild social life at three inter-related levels: (a) rebuilding the state and its governance and service delivery institutions, (b) rebuilding the economy to support the state and society and (c) rebuilding the society to resuscitate the fabric of social and community life. Some of the prominent measures and activities comprised in the attempt to rebuild and stabilise post-conflict environments and mitigate the risk of relapse into armed conflict include disarmament, demobilisation and rehabilitation (DDR) of rebel fighters, insurgents and child soldiers; security sector reforms (SSR), constitutional and political reforms to engender regular elections for the most powerful government positions, competitive political parties, near universal franchise, secret balloting, civil liberties and political rights (human rights), market reforms to attract foreign investments and promote free trade, reconstitution and stabilisation of grassroots communities, etc. (BBC News 2004; Doyle 2005; Cubitt 2012). Many critics charge contemporary peacebuilding with promoting a jaundiced brand of “one-size-fits-all neoliberal peace” agenda as a result of the preceding neo-liberal package whose implementation is often supported by western donor funding, technical expertise and supervision (Francis 2012; Paris 2012; Castaneda 2012). In this book, the identified neo-liberal package of peacebuilding can be alternatively conceptualised as “old peacebuilding strategies.” But this begs the question as to whether “the old peacebuilding” of the neo-liberal tradition is the only peacebuilding game in town. In addition, has neo-liberal peacebuilding always been antithetical to African interests in reconstructing post-conflict societies? What are the alternatives to neo-liberal peacebuilding within the context of the politics of rebuilding countries and societies emerging from war? This book addresses these questions, among others.

Beyond the minimalist approach which reduces peacebuilding to a post-­conflict activity, it is pertinent to recognise that there are a number of proponents that advocate for a more generic or maximalist approach to peacebuilding – one that should encompass the entire conflict spectrum, beginning with the pre-conflict phase and continuing through the armed violence phase and ultimately the post-conflict phase (cf. Olonisakin 2008; Curtis 2012).

The second key feature of the peacebuilding literature in Africa is the preponderant focus on macro-level conflicts of mega-national and regional proportion. The significance of micro-level communal conflict between grassroots communities is hardly acknowledged in the peacebuilding literature yet these conflicts are not only destructive of large feuding communities but sometimes do feed into the discourses of national and regional-level macro-conflicts.

A large number of the micro-level communal conflicts in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) are linked to ambiguities surrounding the issue of land tenure in many states (notably issues about who has the right to own, use and expropriate lands); the age-old traditional economy of cattle raiding and blood feuding between the youth of various affected tribes and communities (notably in the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa), as well as the fact that many feuding ethnic communities straddle between national borders, leading to cross-border mobilisation of ethnic combatants and retreating/reinforcing of fighting forces. Other micro-communal conflict aggravating factors include the high incidence of cattle rustling and destruction of farm crops associated with pastoralists’ herding of their livestock into sedentary farming communities; and the rapid proliferation of small arms and light weapons among hostile communities (Omeje & Hepner 2013).

It suffices to provide a few examples of longstanding, recurrent and seemingly intractable micro-communal conflicts in SSA. In South Sudan, protracted communal conflicts over grazing land and the customary tradition of cattle-raiding have been incessantly waged between various ethnic communities – the Dinka and Lou Nuer in Uror County of Jonglei State; the Lou Nuer and Murle in Jonglei state; the Shilluk and Dinka in Upper Nile State; and the Mundari and Dinka Aliap. Similar traditional blood feuding occurs elsewhere in Kenya between the Turkana and Pokot; and between the pastoral Maasai and the sedentary Kikuyu/Kalenjin in the Laikipia District of the Rift Valley; as well as in Uganda between the Karimojong and Iteso. It is further discernible among the Borana, Gabra and Garri ethnic communities inhabiting the (semi-)arid lands of Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia; between the Karimojong in Uganda and the Pokot and Turkana in Kenya; between the Karimojong in Uganda and Toposa in Sudan; as well as between the resettled Hutu refugees and local Tutsi in North Kivu (Masisi and Ruzizi Plain) following the Rwandan genocide (Omeje 2013). Some of these recurrent communal conflicts such as those among the ethnic communities in South Sudan, and to a lesser extent Kenya, are aggravated by the fact that their cattle-raiding tradition is linked to the customary requirement of a large number of cattle from a potential bridegroom as payment for bride price in traditional marriage ceremonies. Another aggravating factor is the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the region over the years as a consequence of the decades of state failure and major armed conflicts (Omeje 2013).

Elsewhere in West Africa (notably Northern Nigeria, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and northern Cameroun), similar structures of micro-communal conflicts are associated with inter-community disputes over cultivable and grazing lands (herder versus farmer), as well as contestation over which of the communities domiciled in a place form an indigenous community as opposed to a settler or non-indigenous community – classifications that have implications for the right of land ownership, use and transfer (see Omeje 2007; ICG 2012; Uwazie 2014). The observed structural impediments cannot be overemphasised. The vicious role of the post-colonial state sometimes compounds the challenge of redressing communal conflicts in Africa because as Fantu Cheru (2002, 193) has aptly pointed out, the framework of colonial laws and institutions inherited by some states had been designed to exploit local divisions and not to overcome them.

It is instructive that there are many local community-based organisations (CBOs), civil society organisations (CSOs) and regional policy think tanks (e.g. West African Network for Peacebuilding [WANEP] in Tamale in Ghana, Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment [ACODE] in Kampala, Uganda and UPEACE Africa Programme in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) that have done tremendous conflict resolution and peacebuilding works among feuding grassroots communities in West Africa and East Africa/The Horn (WANEP 2012; Ewusi 2014). A section of this book project is devoted to exploring peacebuilding projects focused on grassroots micro-level conflicts and the intersections of these conflicts with some wider macro-level conflicts.

Peacebuilding in Africa and liberal democratic peace

A major aspect of the conceptual and empirical focus of peacebuilding in Africa is the predominance of liberal peace philosophy. Western triumphalism in the Cold War rivalry between the Eastern and Western ideological blocs has since the 1990s rekindled the neo-Kantian liberal democratic peace debate, which in a nutshell postulates that liberal democracy promotes an enduring peace based on accountable government and the tendency towards shared libertarian values (political and economic) both within and amongst states. Coalesced in another form, it is postulated that “peace is necessarily the outcome of liberal democracy, market-based economic reforms and the formation of institutions associated with modern states” (Zambakari 2017, 1). Proponents of liberal peace generally argue that liberal institutional features conduce to peace and are averse to war, hence the dictum that “democracies don’t go to war with each other,” a dictum that has been echoed by two US Presidents in recent decades (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) in their bid to spread democracy as a general antidote to political violence (BBC News 2004; Doyle 2005; Cubitt 2012).

In his 1992 remarks, James Baker, the US Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush was particularly euphoric about the new opportunity presented by the end of the Cold War for liberal democratic peace that he made the following declaration:

The Cold War has ended, and we now have a chance to forge a democratic peace, an enduring peace built on shared values—democracy and political and economic freedom. The strength of these values in Russia and the other new independent states will be the surest foundation for peace—and the strongest guarantee of our national security—for decades to come.

(quoted in Rummel 1997, 1–2)

Proponents have argued that given its penchant for periodic multi-party elections, popular suffrage, accountable representative government, rule of law and respect of individual liberties and human rights, democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other because state officials are more likely to explore non-violent democratic options to resolve their disputes coupled with the supposition that, from a cost-benefit analysis, citizens are more unlikely to consent to a war option (Doyle 2005). It is further argued that citizens can vote out their leaders should they defiantly choose the costly option of going to war against popular will or in the event that they lose a war. Sundry examples of the value of liberal democratic peace and how the phenomenon has made democratic states explore peaceful settlement of disputes are adduced by pundits to support their theory.

A major component of the liberal democratic peace package is market-oriented policy reforms which may include trade and investment deregulation, privatisation and commercialisation of public enterprises, reduction of state subsidies, creating incentives for competition, pro-business policies designed to stimulate growth in output and aggregate demand, etc. The World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) of the 1980s and 1990s tried to blend market-oriented economic reforms and neo-liberal democratic reforms, which produced convoluted mixed results in many African states. The montage of civil wars, rebel insurgencies and violent coups d’é tat experienced in many African countries over the SAP dispensation have been attributed to the troubling backlash of the neo-liberal path to economic recovery, development and peacebuilding (Dibua 2006; Williams 2012).

The avowed belief in the intrinsic and instrumental value of liberal democracy has over the years, especially since the end of the Cold War, led Western proponents and pundits to commit themselves to a vigorous interventionist project aime...