For whom do local peace processes function? Maintaining control through conflict management (original) (raw)
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Localising Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: What Does it Mean
African Journal on Conflict Resolution, 2012
Contemporary peacebuilding processes increasingly propose and adopt local ownership as a fundamental prerequisite in sustainable peacebuilding. Local ownership presupposes the application of an organic and context-specific approach to peacebuilding. Localisation also assumes the active participation of local actors, including national governments, civil society groups, community organisations and the private sector, in achieving a common purpose in peacebuilding processes.1 Following years under the trusteeship of the international community, including the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (UNPBC), Sierra Leone’s post-conflict peacebuilding processes continue. Within this context, this paper examines how questions of local ownership have been understood and operationalised in Sierra Leone since the end of the civil war. The first part of the paper explores the evolution of both the discourse and practice of local ownership in recent years. The second part of the paper pays par...
Undercurrents of Violence: Why Sierra Leone’s Political Settlement is not Working
In post-conflict contexts, political settlements are viewed as instrumental in establishing security and stability. Political settlements are ongoing political processes, which can emerge from one-off events, such as elite pacts and peace agreements; but they can also take the form of dynamic and fluid processes of bargaining, negotiation and compromises between elites that shape the nature of the post-conflict state. Peacebuilding experts and practitioners consider that elite alliances and coalitions, and processes of bargaining and compromise between them, are more stable and less violence-prone if former rebels and contending political elites also have access to national wealth and power. In the case of Sierra Leone, the question of the governance and ownership of natural resources, especially diamonds, was a major factor in the sharing of wealth between contending elites.
International Peacekeeping, 2013
This article investigates local experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone and explains how these experiences were influenced by the parallel administration of many peacebuilding processes. Using qualitative data it shows how the goals and procedures of these various processes overlapped and interacted in the imaginations of local people, generated unpredicted expectations, and eventually led to negative experiences of the commission’s work. I describe how Tsing’s idea of ‘friction’ can helpfully explain local experiences of peacebuilding and the new concept of ‘compound friction’ is introduced as a tool for understanding the local impacts of parallel peacebuilding processes.
IJASS JOURNAL, 2024
This article attempts to explore the utility and agency of community-based peacemaking institutions and approaches in the Southern Region of Sierra Leone. The research paper argues that peacemaking at the community level is historically rooted and has contemporary footnotes for their inclusivity and socio-cultural sensitivity. The researcher further contends that the people in this region employ community-based approaches and institutions to confront and resolve conflicts, promote peace and reconcile conflicting parties. The research utilized the qualitative approach to data collection including desk review and content analysis of relevant literature, interviewing critical grassroots stakeholders such as traditional leaders, Community Based Organizations, grassroots movements and women and youth groups. The article establishes that indigenous structures available at the community level have proven to be participatory, sensitive to socio-cultural ethos of the local community, closer to the people, familiar with the conflict context and content and appeal more to the greater majority of the people directly affected by the scourges of conflicts. The researcher, however, concedes that times are fast changing, and young women and men are ‗infected‘ by ideas from the outside world and are often no longer willing to subordinate themselves to gerontocratic rule and/or old ways of conducting business. Because of these changing times and the fact that society has significantly evolved over the years, the needs and responses are not necessarily the same. Therefore, community-based organizations can best be placed to play a complementary role to modern-day state peace initiatives and approaches
Whose Peace? Grappling with Local Ownership in Sierra Leone
Peace and Conflict Studies, 2022
Local ownership has become a basic tenet of post-conflict peacebuilding strategies sponsored by the International Community. However, research on peacebuilding underlines a gap between policy discourse and actual practice. This paper illustrates the challenges and opportunities posed by the promotion of local ownership by assessing the case of Sierra Leone. This West African country is often labelled as one of the most successful peacebuilding interventions thus far. However, by analysing the interaction between insiders and outsiders during the initial post-conflict phase (1996-2007), this paper concludes that stakeholders perceived differently the meaning and policies associated with the concept of local ownership. In this regard, the country's peacebuilding "success story" should be nuanced in light of the shortcomings and challenges identified. The Sierra Leonean case study provides us with an opportunity to revisit and reflect on the contradictions and limitations of the liberal peacebuilding project with a view to work towards sustainable peace and development.
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.
Briefing -Limitations of Individualistic Peacebuilding in Postwar Sierra Leone
This paper focuses on two postwar initiatives in Sierra Leone: the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) process and the transitional justice process through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The paper examines both processes and points to some of their limitations. It pays special attention to the problems of defining and identifying “perpetrators” and “victims” and the lack of gender and disability mainstreaming in both the DDR and TRC processes. The paper argues that in order for these processes to be more successful at facilitating peacebuilding in postwar Sierra Leone, a more holistic communal bottom-up policy approach is needed.
Zones of peace and local peace processes in Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone
Peacebuilding, 2018
This article examines the issue of peace and restraint within ongoing conflicts. While the vast majority of the literature on civil wars in Africa concentrates on drivers of conflict and instances of violence, there are zones of peace where locally peace processes have developed despite conflicts around them. These spaces have been neglected in both the academic literature and the major datasets on conflict and war, which mostly focuses on the belligerent, or sometimes the victims. The literature that does exist is concentrated in Latin America (especially Colombia) rather than Africa. This paper records six different episodes in Côte d'Ivoire and Sierra Leone and seeks to understand the reasons why these spaces were able to maintain some level of peace. The paper discusses the practicalities of exercising peace on the ground and the implications for subsequent peacebuilding, along with drawing conclusions about differences in the nature of warfare regionally.
Third World Quarterly, 2021
The 'local' has become central to peacebuilding, both in theory and in practice. While there is extensive conceptual literature analysing the 'local' , there is much less that looks at how what is often considered local in peacebuilding programmes actually works in practice. The empirical peacebuilding literature that does exist has largely focussed on the international-local interface and those studies that have focussed solely on the 'local' largely rely on discussions with more elite civil society leaders. In contrast, this article empirically analyses 'local-local' dynamics. Using a Sierra Leonean peacebuilding project called Fambul Tok, this article both provides in-depth analysis on how the organisation externally projects itself as 'local' and contrasts this with how the organisation actually works in practice. Externally, Fambul Tok's media materials equate 'local' with Sierra Leonean place and people, as well as notions of culture and tradition. However, by examining the dynamics between different Sierra Leoneans, including staff members and programme participants, a complex picture of the 'locallocal' emerges. I argue that by engaging with comprehensive empirical research, we can understand how local peacebuilding is actually experienced and enacted and how the theoretical discussions of the 'local' and 'local-local' in peacebuilding converge with how peacebuilding works in practice.