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The International Peace Academy
Provides a context for understanding West Africa's security dilemmas, highlighting the link between failures of economic development, governance, and democratization on the one hand and military insecurity and violent conflicts on the other.
This monograph highlights the necessity for taking preventive measures in the form of peace-building as a sustainable and long-term solution to conflicts in West Africa, with a special focus on the Mano River Union countries. Apart from the Mano River Union countries, efforts at resolving other conflicts in say, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, C?te d'Ivoire and Nigeria, have suffered from a lack of attention on the post-conflict imperatives of building peace in order to ensure that sustainable peace is achieved. Given the often intractable and inter-related nature of conflicts in this region, it argues for the need to revisit the existing mechanisms of conflict resolution in the sub-region with a view to canvassing a stronger case for stakeholders towards adopting the peace-building strategy as a more practical and sustainable way of avoiding wars in the sub-region. Peace-building in consonance with its infrastructure is a more sustainable approach to ensuring regional peace and stability and, therefore, ensuring development for the peoples of West Africa. Dr Osita Agbu is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Lagos. His areas of specialization include Peace and Conflict studies, Governance and Democratization and Technology and Development. He was until recently, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies, Chiba, Japan.
This interdisciplinary book brings together innovative chapters that address the entire spectrum of the African peacebuilding landscape and showcases findings from original studies on peacebuilding. With a range of perspectives, the chapters cover the full gamut of peacebuilding (i.e. the continuum between conflict prevention and post-war reconstruction) and address both micro and macro peacebuilding issues in the five regions of Africa. Moving beyond the tendency to focus on a single case study or few case studies in peacebuilding scholarship, the chapters examine critical peacebuilding issues at the local, state, regional, extra-regional, and continental levels in Africa. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of African politics, peace and security studies, regional organizations, development studies, state-building, and more broadly to international relations, public policy, diplomacy, international organizations, and the wider social sciences.
Africa lies at the centre of the international community’s peacebuilding interventions, and the continent’s rich multitude of actors, ideas, relationships, practices, experiences, locations, and contexts in turn shapes the possibilities and practices of contemporary peacebuilding. This timely new handbook surveys and analyses peacebuilding as it operates in this specifically African context. The book begins by outlining the evolution and the various ideologies, conceptualizations, institutions, and practices of African peacebuilding. It identifies critical differences in how African peacebuilders have conceptualized and operationalized peacebuilding. The book then considers how different actors sustain, construct, and use African infrastructure to identify and analyse converging, differing, or competing mandates, approaches, and interests. Finally, it analyses specific thematic issues such as gender, justice, development, democracy, and the politics of knowledge before ending with in-depth analyses of case studies drawn from across the continent. Bringing together an international line-up of expert contributors, this book will be an essential read for students and scholars of African politics, post-conflict reconstruction, security, and peace and conflict studies.
This book outlines challenges to the effective operation of regional economic communities (RECs) with regards to peacebuilding in Africa. Critically examining these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on comparative analysis of the status, role, and performances of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), it examines particular constraints to their effective participation in regional initiatives. Focussing on inadequate technical capabilities, the complicity of state and non-state actors in conflicts within a region, the domestic politics of member states, it additionally addresses related theories and practices of peacekeeping, security, development, and the peacebuilding nexus. It also engages provisioning, regionalism, and regional peacekeeping interventions, the legal and institutional framework of RECs, and civil society and peacebuilding. Fundamentally, the book asks how effective the alliances and partnerships are in promoting regional peace and security and how much they are compromised by the intervention of external powers and actors, exploring new ideas and actions that may strengthen capacities to address the peacebuilding challenges on the continent effectively. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of African politics and studies, peace and security studies, regionalism studies, policy practitioners in the field of African peacebuilding, and more broadly to international relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003093695, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
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.
This book examines the role of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) practitioners in coordinating, creating, and managing regional governance practices in the areas of public health, peace and security, and microfinancial integration. Since 1975, there have been many failed and successful attempts at unconstitutional government changes in West Africa. During this same period, numerous instruments have been designed to promote peace and security in the region. This book examines the role of bureaucratic actors in the ECOWAS in harmonizing regional integration policy in West Africa. Using data from fieldwork in several countries in West Africa, Balogun observes how ECOWAS practitioners network and strategically engage regional stakeholders in health, peace and security, and finance as a means to deepen harmonization between ECOWAS Member States and build a connection with civil society. Balogun argues that the founding conditions of ECOWAS set the organization on an institutional path to adapt its approaches to regional governance. Region-Building in West Africa challenges the idea that self-interested leaders limit regional cooperation. The book also challenges the idea that the bureaucrats in the organization are glorified servants to their governments. Region-Building in West Africa instead focuses on the influence that bureaucrats have in shaping the international policy agenda of ECOWAS. This book will be useful to scholars, students, and practitioners in Africa and beyond who want to better understand the inner workings of African regional organizations, and the processes that drive cooperation across West Africa.
ECOWAS and the Dynamics of Conflict and Peace-building testifies to the fact that we cannot talk of West African affairs, more so of conflict and peace-building, without talking about ECOWAS. For over two decades now, West Africa has remained one of Africa's most conflict-ridden regions. It has been a theatre of some of the most atrocious brutalities in the modern world. It has, nonetheless, witnessed one of the most ambitious internal efforts towards finding regional solutions to conflicts through ECOWAS. The lead role of ECOMOG - the ECOWAS peacekeeping force - in search of peaceful solutions to civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau and Cote d'Ivoire has yielded a mix of successes and failures. In this book, the authors take a candid look at the role that ECOWAS has played and show how the sub-regional organisation has stabilised and created new conditions conducive to nation building in a number of cases. Conversely, the book shows that ECOWAS has aggravated, if not created, new tensions in yet other cases. The comparative advantage that ECOWAS has derived from these experiences is reflected in the various mechanisms, protocols and conventions that are now in place to ensure a more comprehensive conflict prevention framework. This book provides a nuanced analysis of the above issues and other dynamics of conflicts in the region. It also interrogates the roles played by ECOWAS and various other actors in the context of the complex interplay between natural resource governance, corruption, demography and the youth bulge, gender and the conflicting interests of national, regional and international players.
This book concerns the United Nations’ peacemaking, peacekeeping, peace-building, and post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Africa from 1960 to 2021. Succinctly discussed are historic and contemporary peace, security, and economic engagements within 18 countries spanning eight African regions: the Great Lakes; the Economic Community of Central African States; East Africa; the Horn of Africa; North Africa; the Sahel Region; West Africa; and Southern Africa. The book develops a neo-realist and imperialist critique that discusses how resource-rich, conflict-ridden states have become easy targets for capitalists, terrorists, and transnational crime, aligned to geostrategic parochial interests. Critically argued is that endogenous economic growth factors, if applied effectively, can achieve both peace and security, and meet the Global Sustainable Development Goals. Such efforts require constructive engagement with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US. However, the book contends that the cornerstone of multilateral engagement involves Africa’s 55 states and the African Union’s three major pillars: the Peace and Security Council, the African Governance Architecture, and the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Development Centre, which have the ability to move resource-rich, conflict-ridden states out of transnational crime and poverty. This book offers wide-ranging analyses of contemporary African diplomacy and a compelling critique of UN peacekeeping efforts in Africa, which resonates to scholars of international relations, peace and conflict studies, and African politics.