The Liberal Peace and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in Africa: Sierra Leone (original) (raw)
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2015
A multiplicity of factors have contributed to the outbreak of hostilities in many African countries. However, there are some factors which have played a significant role in prolonging conflict and making conflict resolution in the region extremely difficult. I hypothesize that the factors that prolong conflict in Africa need to be dealt with as a matter of prerequisite for conflict prevention and resolution in Africa and that in order to avoid the prolongation of civil conflict, underlying key economic, political, social and cultural problems need to be resolved. This is based on the assumption that the disequilibrium among these factors is fundamentally responsible for the outbreak of hostilities in the first place, as individuals and groups fight over the control of resources, inequalities, differential treatment of communities, and political power, among other things.
State Formation and Conflict in Africa
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
Dominant narratives and theories developed at the turn of the 21st century to account for the links between state formation and civil wars in Africa converged around two main ideas. First was the contention that the increase in civil wars across the continent—like that in many parts of the globe, including South Asia and Central Europe—was linked to state failure or decay. Violent conflict thus came to be seen as the expression of the weakness, disintegration, and collapse of political institutions in the postcolonial world. Second, guerrilla movements, once viewed as the ideological armed wings of Cold War contenders, then came to be seen as roving bandits interested in plundering the spoils left by decaying states, and their motives as primarily, if not only, economic or personal, rather than political. However, recent research has challenged the reductionism that underlay such accounts by looking into the day-to-day politics of civil war, thus moving beyond the search for the motives that bring rebels and rebel movements to wage war against the established order. Drawing on this literature, this article argues that violent conflict is part and parcel of historical processes of state formation. Thus, in order to understand how stable political institutions can be built in the aftermath of civil war, it is essential to study the institutions that regulate political life during conflict. This implies a need not only to look at how (and if) state institutions survive once war has broken out, but also to take into account the institutions put in place in areas beyond the control of the state.
2004
Introduction Inter-related civil wars in Liberia (from1989), Sierra Leone (from1991) and Cote d’Ivoire (from 2002) have attracted various explanations. One briefly influential theory suggested “new war”was a post-Cold War upsurge of African barbarism (Kaplan 1994). Other accounts have stressed economic motivations (Berdal & Malone 2001; Collier 2000). Every war needs resources, but whether economics is a sufficient cause of war is controversial. There seems little evidence the West African wars were started by economic competition alone, and the “greed, not grievance” hypothesis has lost some of its shine. Cultural determinism, by contrast, continues to attract adherents (Huntington 2000). One account of the war in Liberia (Ellis 1999) links the violence to “privatization” of ideas about human sacrifice associated with Poro (the male initiation association). Those who consider culture effect, not cause, will be anxious to examine other approaches (Kuper 1999). This paper outlines an...
Conflict in West African States
2020
The history of West Africa is a series of conflicts: Most of the states have seen civil wars (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast), coups d’état (Gambia, Niger, Guinea) as well as ethnic and religious clashes (Benin, Nigeria, Mali) since gaining independence. Moreover, poverty, political despotism, corruption and foreign interference have turned ‘the dreams of an economically integrated and politically united West Africa into a living nightmare for most of its citizens’ (Adebajo, 2002: 39). Outstandingly brutal and violent was the era after the Cold War, when several countries experienced destructive civil wars on their soil. Thus, this essay will shed light on the question why West African states have been so prone to conflict over the past generation.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Since the independence processes in the African continent, armed conflicts, peace and security have raised concern and attention both at the domestic level and at the international scale. In recent years, all aspects have undergone significant changes which have given rise to intense debate. The end of some historical conflicts has taken place in a context of slight decrease in the number of armed conflicts and the consolidation of post-conflict reconstruction processes. Moreover, African regional organizations have staged an increasingly more active internal shift in matters related to peace and security, encouraged by the idea of promoting "African solutions to African problems". This new scenario, has been accompanied by new uncertainties at the security level and major challenges at the operational level, especially for the African Union. This article aims to ascertain the state of affairs on all these issues and raise some key questions to consider.
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Continuity and Change in War and Conflict in Africa
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Since the end of the Cold War, Africa has experienced a disproportionately large number of armed conflicts. Between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, Africa underwent a period of significant progress in reducing the number and intensity of armed conflicts. Since 2010, however, the continent has witnessed some disturbing upward conflict trends. This article focuses on the major patterns in armed conflict in Africa since 2010.
This monograph is a collection of papers that were presented at the African Human Security Initiative conference that was held in Addis Ababa in February 2008. It discusses the changing methodologies used to analyse and map violent confllcts conflict resolution and peace building approaches in Africa by moving away from westernfocused socio-political lenses that have defined the different policy reactions to confl ict in the region. It is thus an attempt to apply a more holistic, multidisciplinary approach to understanding causes of violent conflict and, perhaps more importantly, how to diffuse them in a way that allows for the total disengagement of the military from the political control of the state by positioning the former in a manner that allows them to safeguard the territorial integrity of the states they serve, as this guarantees democratic stability by protecting and defending legitimate democratic institutions. The monograph’s chapters offer distinctive and harmonising approaches to the way in which peace is, and can be, achieved in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Defense & Security Analysis, 2014
Understanding contemporary conflicts in Africa remains directly dependent on the approaches employed to decipher or interpret them. This article first examines the bias of conventional approaches (inherited from the Cold War) and then those of a series of supposedly “newer” approaches. Relying primarily on West African examples, it offers a brief overview of current knowledge, issues, and avenues for research, based on three apparent characteristics of a “new generation” of conflicts: the regionalization of wars, the privatization of violence and security, and the recourse to extreme forms of brutality. These three major trends bear witness to a rapid transformation of war and armed violence over the past 20 years, but they are not sufficient to establish a radical historical break between “old” and “new” conflicts in Africa. By concealing elements of continuity a priori, the most influential “new” approaches actually make it impossible to ponder their own limits. To that end, fashionability and struggles for influence within the Africanist field play a major role in perpetuating dominant, sensationalistic, or simplistic (and invariably incorrect) portrayals of African conflicts.