Strategies for Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in Africa

Abstract

Building a lasting peace in a post-conflict environment is one of the most daunting challenges to global peace and security. Peacebuilding requires sustained international supports for national efforts across the broadest range of activities. These include monitoring cease-fire, demilitarizing, demobilizing, and reintegrating combatants, assisting the return of refugees and displaced persons, helping to organize and monitor elections of the new government, enhancing human rights protection and fostering reconciliation, etc. The United Nations has been at the center of expanding international peacebuilding efforts in all the continents of the world. These UN efforts have paid off handsomely, with Africa being one of the greatest beneficiaries. This paper examines the strategies for post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa. It raises questions on the conception, logic, origin, ideology, and practice of post-conflict peacebuilding in the continent. It argues that extant peacebuilding in Africa is wrongly embedded in peacekeeping, and some of the present peacebuilding efforts on the continent are geared toward negative rather than positive peace, and in most cases, it is usually influenced by actors outside the continent. It concludes that the existing logic and practice of peacebuilding in Africa is aimed at ‘stability’ (especially at the macro level) rather than change and security rather than lasting peace.