Meeting The Challenge Of Conflict Prevention In Africa

"These two volumes clearly demonstrate the efforts by a wide range of African scholars to explain the roots, routes, regimes and resolution of African conflicts and how to re-build post-conflict societies. They offer sober and serious analyses, eschewing the sensationalism of the western media and the sophistry of some of the scholars in the global North for whom African conflicts are at worst a distraction and at best a confirmation of their pet racist and petty universalist theories." --From the introduction by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza This book offers analyses of a range of African conflicts and demonstrates that peace is too important to be left to outsiders.

The publication is a compilation of the reports submitted to the Central Organ of the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution and the communiqués issued by the latter between July 2002 and June 2003.

Elections have emerged as one of the most important, and most contentious, features of political life on the African continent. In the first half of this decade, there were more than 20 national elections, serving largely as capstones of peace processes or transitions to democracies. The outcomes of these and more recent elections have been remarkably varied, and the relationship between elections and conflict management is widely debated throughout Africa and among international observers. Elections can either help reduce tensions by reconstituting legitimate government, or they can exacerbate them by further polarizing highly conflictual societies. This timely volume examines the relationship between elections, especially electoral systems, and conflict management in Africa, while also serving as an important reference for other regions. The book brings together for the first time the latest thinking on the many different roles elections can play in democratization and conflict management.

New wars will continue to erupt if greater and smarter efforts are not made to prevent them. Current dangers stem from factors such as rise of unstable regimes, global economic turbulence, climate change, and shift in global power distribution. Preventing relapse after wars end is insufficient to prevent most new conflicts, because post-conflict recurrences constitute only a minority of all conflict outbreaks. A wide range of governments, including United States, and many intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations have made commitments to take serious efforts to prevent violent conflicts. These commitments represent a more than adequate normative foundation and a supportive political environment for development of more effective conflict prevention strategies.

This volume considers the options available to donors in the effort to prevent conflict and enhance prospects for peaceful social, economic and political development.

How can the United Nations, regional and subregional organizations, government donors, and other policymakers best apply the tools of conflict prevention to the wide range of intrastate conflict situations actually found in the field? The detailed case studies and analytical chapters in From Promise to Practice offer operational lessons for fashioning strategy and tactics to meet the challenges of specific conflicts, both potential and actual.

The Cameroon-Nigerian border conflict over the Bakassi peninsula is a result of colonial negligence. Local interests and boundaries were disregarded when colonial powers were partitioning Africa. The Bakassi Peninsula's richness in natural resources (oil, gas and fish) is the main reason why Cameroon and Nigeria are at loggerheads over the region. Attempts at solving this conflict have failed and even the ICJ ruling does not stand a better chance of settling this dispute if the interests of the local population are not considered.

This handbook offers a critical assessment of the African agenda for conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding; the challenges and opportunities facing Africa’s regional organisations in their efforts towards building sustainable peace on the continent; and the role of external actors, including the United Nations, Britain, France, and South Asian troop-contributing countries. In so doing, it revisits the late Ali Mazrui’s concept of Pax Africana, calling on Africans to take responsibility for peace and security on their own continent. The creation of the African Union, in 2002, was an important step towards realising this ambition, and has led to the development of a new continental architecture for more robust conflict management. But, as the volume’s authors show, the quest for Pax Africana faces challenges. Combining thematic analyses and case studies, this book will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers working on peace, security, and governance issues in Africa.