Zones of peace and local peace processes in Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone (original) (raw)
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Africa has been the site of one-third of all the armed interand intra-state conflicts that have taken place since 1946.2 Devastating wars, such as those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria and South Sudan—are currently taking place on the African continent. But this bleak picture is not the whole story. In the 1980s, Southern Africa was ravaged by wars in Angola and Mozambique, among others. In the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century, the world was shocked by the brutal wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. At present, however, Southern Africa has been spared large-scale violent conflicts for about two decades. West Africa, with the important exception of Mali, has also been less torn by armed conflict in the past decade. In addition, some countries, such as Botswana, Benin and Zambia, have remained peaceful since independence and others have only experienced brief spells of violent conflict. This section examines the diversity of peace and war in Africa, an...
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Between the Christmas coup of 1999 and the end of the post-electoral crisis in April 2011, Ivoirians witnessed stretches of unsteady, insecure peace punctuated by episodes of acute violence and atrocity. From April to December 2011, UNICEF was actively involved in responding to the most recent humanitarian crisis based upon operational commitments embedded in the Core Commitments for Children (CCC). Though by early October 2011, widespread armed confrontation was no longer an issue of greatest concern, UNICEF’s Representative remained concerned by the high level of tensions in the West, reports of persistent violence in and around Bouaké, and the stalemate of the reconciliation process. As a result, he determined that it was imperative to engage in formal conflict analysis, the objective of which was to map this complex conflict for the purpose of better understanding its causes, dynamics, and consequences and to assess the present state of tensions in the country. Doing so should aid UNICEF in better implementing its recovery and transition mission so as to improve its contribution to the larger peacebuilding enterprise pursued by the Government and the international community.
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.
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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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.