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1Introduction A social justice perspective of politics of peacebuilding in Africa
Thomas Kwasi Tieku, Amanda Coffie, Mary Boatemaa Setrana, and Akin Taiwo
DOI: 10.4324/9781003187585-1
This book examines the politics of peacebuilding in the African continent. By politics of peacebuilding, this book refers to the fact that peacebuilding is both a technical exercise and a political project. The technical aspects are activities designed to create conditions for peace to emerge. These activities, which are well documented in social sciences scholarship, range from conflict prevention, management, resolution to postwar reconstruction (see Jeng, 2012, Curtis and Dzinesa, 2012; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2015; Omeje, 2019).
Under the technical aspect, the conflict prevention part of peacebuilding focuses on activities that seek to address underlying causes of war and are designed to avoid large-scale violence (Murithi, 2009; Sabaratnam, 2017). Within the conflict prevention frameworks, countries that have systems in place to ward off the outbreak of large-scale violence and have so far managed to escape from the scourge of major wars are considered the best peacebuilders. In the context of Africa, countries such as Botswana, Cape Verde, and Ghana that have not had any large-scale war are positive cases of peacebuilding under the conflict prevention framework. The conflict management and resolution dimensions are tools used to manage existing violence. These aspects of peacebuilding usually focus on elite accommodation, prioritize stability over justice, and elevate the need for negative peace (i.e. absence of war or large-scale physical killings) over addressing symbolic violence (i.e. oppression by the dominant class or group and the ideology which legitimates and naturalizes it) and structural conflict (i.e. psychological, mental, cultural, economic, spiritual, or physical harm that people and groups suffer from institutional practices and institutions sustaining and reproducing it). Peacebuilders in this context often have a general agreement that the violence cannot be fully eliminated, rather, it is assumed that violence can only be managed and tamed. A classic example of this type of peacebuilding occurred in Burundi immediately after the Arusha peace accord signed by Burundi warring parties in 2001. Under the conflict management and resolution framework, structural and symbolic violence, including widespread injustices, coexist with a semblance of peace in most part of the society. The postwar reconstruction dimension of peacebuilding is an activity designed to transform conflict societies by eliminating the underlying causes of physical, symbolic, and structural violence. Thus, the technical aspects of peacebuilding are measures designed to prevent, manage, and resolve conflicts, as well as activities aimed at bringing about durable peace.
The political dimension of peacebuilding is the process that allows certain actors to exercise power over others. Peacebuilding is political to the extent that it influences power dynamics in conflict zones and postwar societies. Some actors are empowered while others are disempowered in the process of peacebuilding. The politics of peacebuilding is thus meant to signal that, at face value, peacebuilding seems to be an apolitical enterprise, but in practice, power is embedded in it.
Understanding peacebuilding as a political project is not a radical notion; however, it traditionally has not been highlighted explicitly in peacebuilding literature. The idea that peacebuilding is political is fronted in this book primarily to remind readers that power is everywhere, as Michel Foucault (1991) once said. Peacebuilding is not exempt from the influence of power dynamics. Treating peacebuilding as a purely technical project, as many works on peacebuilding tend to do, ignores the history of peacebuilding on the African continent. As Tieku (2021) notes, the history of peacebuilding in Africa since independence is a story of political engineering rather than just a technical exercise. Moreover, making it clear from the onset that peacebuilding practices and knowledge are highly political in nature opens the space for critical reflection on the normative underpinnings of peacebuilding in Africa.
Thus, although the political and technical dimensions of peacebuilding are understood separately, they coexist and cannot operate independently of each other. Their interactions have produced at least five consequential outcomes in Africa since independence. First, the politics of peacebuilding has led to the fetishization of the Westphalian sovereign states in Africa. Peacebuilding across the African continent has focused on the creation or strengthening of the “Weberian and Westphalian common sense.”1 The Weberian and Westphalian common sense has been promoted by international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), World Bank, and continental organizations such as the Organization of African Unity/the African Union (AU) (see, e.g. Olonisakin and Ikpe, 2012). Peacebuilding as a state-building exercise has focused primarily on legitimizing colonial boundaries, institutionalizing central governments control over these territories, and developing norms to protect the territorial integrity of colonially demarcated areas. The Agenda for Peace turned state-building into a peace-building norm. As Call and Cook (2003, p.235) put it, most scholars and practitioners “rely on the currency given the term by Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace,” which used peacebuilding interchangeably with “state-building in societies emerging from armed conflict.” Attempts to replicate the Western state system have been approached in different ways, including military intervention to prevent the collapse of the central government as in the case of Somalia in the 1990s, mediation aimed at creating space for elite accommodation as in the cases of Kenya and Zimbabwe in the 2000s, and the case of Mali, which began in the 2010s and has continued into the 2020s. These attempts also include the establishment of a new political path as in the case of Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, as well as institutional design to ensure that different ethnic groups coexist in a non-violent way as in the case of Burundi in the 2000s. Little opportunity has been given to those who want to imagine alternative political systems that may perhaps be more suitable to the societies that the peacebuilders are dealing with. Some would even argue that those who have dared to imagine an alternative political system have encountered epistemic violence at policy and intellectual levels. In other words, the idea of the state has become a hegemonic discourse, in Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) conception, that there is no room for contrarian views. For instance, attempts by those who write from the pan-African perspective to imagine a continental state system that can replace the Westphalian model are often met with ridicule, condemnation, or outright contempt by mainstream social science scholars and policy-makers (see Mathews, 2018; Asante, 2018).
Second, the politics of peacebuilding has led to excessive focus on good governance programming. This good governance programming entails empowering central government institutions to be efficient in the delivery of public goods, usually to elite in urban centres, as well as ensuring the rule of law for educated upper and middle classes who can afford to go to court (Zanotti, 2011; Nouwen, 2012). These measures are meant to promote negative peace, enhance the capacity of holders of state authority, provide military security to the critical mass of population, and create the space for elites to share power and state resources. If successful, the good governance model should recreate a society similar to those that exist in most Western states (Zanotti, 2011).
Third, the politics of peacebuilding has created an overemphasis on postwar reconstruction. The African Union Post Conflict Reconstruction and Development (PCRD) is a classic example of the conception of peacebuilding as reconstruction of postwar societies. The conception of the peacebuilding in the PCRD is not only synonymous with reconstruction of states emerging from war, but it also outlines classic liberal peacebuilding activities such as conflict resolution, Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration, security sector reforms, and promotion of democracy as the key to building durable peace in African societies. These activities are designed to replace traditional and customary practices with those that have held together societies in Western countries. As a result, many of the countries that have emerged from war have similar national institutions, irrespective of the diversity of societies they are supposed to govern. The similarities of national institutions of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and Burundi, just to mention a few, are no mere coincidence. In many instances, the national institutions of postwar societies are more in tune with societies in Western states than the cultural makeup of these postwar countries. Call and Cook (2003, p.233) aptly point out that:
The fourth consequence of the politics of peacebuilding has led to the increasing move to restructure the postwar economies, pushing them to adapt to neoliberal economic policies, such as structural adjustments, open market economic principles, removal of subsidies, promotion of imports from donor countries, and the creation of a viable private sector-led economic development. The result is that most of the African countries that have emerged from wars have tended to be outward looking and have exposed themselves to global economic competition. Consequently, most of these countries have ended up removing several measures that protected vulnerable groups. Indeed, few of these countries can claim to have social safety nets for their vulnerable groups. Almost all of them have ended up changing the taste of a significant number of their populations from consuming locally produced goods in favor of consumption of foreign imported goods and services. The fundamental change of consumption pattern is not only seen in the attitudes and behaviors of people in postwar societies such as Burundi, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and Angola but they also reflect more of the consumption pattern of donor countries. Little wonder that the lifestyles in cities such as Luanda and Freetown have more similarities with cities like New York and Los Angeles than cities in African states where no peacebuilding activities have taken place. In some instances, the new economy that peacebuilding projects have introduced reproduces violence as Ahmad (2012) uncovered in Somalia.
Finally, the politics of peacebuilding has created a situation where the voices and ideas of a few well-known resident African scholars and numerous foreign-based experts have dominated knowledge production of African peacebuilding landscape (see, e.g. Karbo and Virk, 2018). Some would even argue that those who have the loudest voices in the field of African peacebuilding are individuals who often parachute into war zones and postwar societies in Africa to test ideas they have developed elsewhere and/or to gain new knowledge for consumption outside of the African continent. As Curtis and Dzinesa (2012, p.15) point out, peacebuilding is often “driven by external ideas and by the disciplining power of external norms rather than by the meanings and values from within African countries and locales.” These voices have eclipsed those of African scholars who have done original research, have been enmeshed in the peacebuilding processes, or have intimate knowledge of the African peacebuilding landscape but are not yet household names in the academic world of African and African studies. This book seeks to overcome this problem in peacebuilding scholarship.
Conceptualizing a social justice approach to peacebuilding in Africa
This book takes a social justice perspective, which is a worldview that sees every individual as equally valuable and suggests that everybody has a right to live in a just, fair, harmonious, and equitable society (Metz, 2016; Baker and Obradovic-Wochnik, 2016). As an analytical tool, a social justice perspective directs scholars to identify and theorize systemic inequities with a view to eliminating them (Christie, Wagner and Winter, 2001; Seedat, Suffla and Christie, 2017). The elimination of inequities should be between countries and within states (Curtis and Dzinesa, 2012). A social justice perspective therefore sees redistribution of resources, power, and the creation of inclusive societies as the key to ensuring harmony within people, their social relations, and the community to which they belong.
An inclusive society can best be created if existing power structures are redistributed fairly and equitably among social groups, individuals, and communities (Metz, 2016; Seedat, Suffla and Christie, 2017). Power, in a social justice framework, has four main components. They are compulsory (i.e. direct control by one actor over another), institutional (i.e. indirect control by one actor over the other through formal rules, practices, and norms), structural (i.e. the capacity to influence another person through informal institutions such as social status and privilege), and productive (i.e. control which is exercised through forces of production and subjective systems of meaning and signification) (Barnett and Duvall, 2005, p.43). A social justice lens calls for a fair and equitable distribution of all four elements of power within and between states.
As applied to peacebuilding, a social justice perspective directs the analyst away from order maintenance activities and toward structural and institutional change that ensures that elites cannot reproduce the positions of power they had prior to the outbreak of war, and that those who were previously marginalized and felt powerless are given a meaningful voice in the management of their own affairs. This conception of a social justice approach to peacebuilding has four key elements. First, it sees the main objective of peacebuilding as transforming societies that have experienced violent conflict in such a way that systemic group disadvantages will cease to exist. In other words, peacebuilding is supposed to empower marginalized groups to such an extent that individuals in postwar societies will live at peace with themselves (see Mamdani, 1997). Second, the target of peacebuilding is the creation of harmonious relationships between people in communities, rather than (re-)building and empowering of state or government institutions.
Third, the central referent of peacebuilding are human beings and their social relations, rather than organizations which govern human relations. In other words, a social justice approach seeks to humanize peacebuilding by moving it away from an institution-first perspective to a hu...
