Twenty Years of UNSC Resolution 1325 call for a Frank Forward Look

Since the United Nations (UN) adopted UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in 2000 there have been significant shifts in discourse and practice on gender, peace and security. Twenty years later, conscious of the original limitations that shaped UNSCR 1325 in the first place, we must account for these shifts whilst striving to do much more than simply sustain the agenda

Re-conceptualising leadership for effective peacemaking and human security in Africa

This article explores the meaning of peace and human security from the perspective of the individual — the presumed referent point of security — and examines responses to armed conflict, a leading source of insecurity for African peoples. It identifies inherent flaws in approaches to conflict in Africa and looks to a different field — that of leadership — for a more effective formula for peacemaking. In the absence of a framework that can effectively end the cycle of conflict relapse in Africa, the paper argues that an alternative framing of leadership is needed; and that alternative leadership approaches to dealing with conflict and insecurity offer a chance for stable peace and human security. It suggests that an expanded perspective on leadership provides a basis for exploring interventions that can potentially alter peacemaking discourses as well as the terrain in which peacemaking takes place. The article therefore asks what a focus on the individual as the referent point of security means if and when viewed from the perspective of a collection of individuals. In this regard, it presents emerging perspectives from a study of young Africans on leadership programmes in a classroom setting and attempts to extrapolate them to wider societal settings. It then explores how a different perspective of leadership might serve as a facilitator of peace and human security in Africa, drawing examples from past and on-going situations of armed conflict in Africa.http://www.up.ac.za/en/political-sciences/article/19718/strategic-review-for-southern-africaam2016Political Science

Making a case for reframing narratives of peacebuilding in Africa

This paper examines two main types of violent and armed conflict settings. The first consists of situations of armed conflict where violence ended on the battlefield, such as in Ethiopia and Rwanda. The second includes situations where the end of violence and the post-conflict agenda were negotiated and facilitated either internally or by external interveners such as the United Nations or regional organisations, such as in the case of South Sudan. The study focuses on forms of peace settlement that are able to return to the nation and state building conversations that lie at the root of the conflicts

Crises of war-to-peace transition and civil war recurrences : a focus on leadership building and the postcolonial state in Africa

This paper focuses on process-based leadership as an entry point for discussion of war-to-peace transitions. Process-based approaches to leadership reside in the interactions between leaders and followers. Too great an expectation is often placed on individual leaders to effect transformation: armed conflict is likely to re-ignite in more than 40 per cent of conflict situations where peace was previously negotiated. In dealing with conflict relapse, few alternatives exist in academic and policy literature to dominant approaches to peacebuilding. The starting point for war-to-peace transition is a return to the state building conversations that preceded armed conflict in the affected society

ECOWAS and Civil Society Movements in West Africa

This article argues that the West African subregion has radically shifted its approach to security from a state?centred framework to one that now encompasses human security concerns. Civil society is now an active part of the regional security decision?making processes. While it has been difficult to transform local?level civil society engagement into a large?scale regional involvement, civil society engagement with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has nonetheless become more focused and effective. This article explains this transformation in the regional security agenda and ECOWAS?civil society collaboration, contending that the institutionalisation of the latter has had a mutually beneficial impact. It concludes with a discussion of the challenges that lie ahead for this relationship and the process of movement building

Thinking about peace and the role of state building and political settlement in the pursuit of sustainable peace in Africa

The nature of liberal peace used for reconstitution of states after conflict is essentially a one-size-fits-all paradigm. The central idea in this study is that it is the nature of internal conversations between leaders and peoples that determine the path to a viable, peaceful state. This research aims to reframe the state-building–peacebuilding problematic by re-centring the notion of conversation in the processes of peacebuilding and state building. Charting conversation among contending actors in non-violent ways is not simply a method for post-conflict restoration; it can also result in transformation of institutions

Militancy and violence in West Africa : reflecting on radicalisation, comparing contexts and evaluating effectiveness of preventive policies

By 2000, ‘radicalisation’ had become a major global issue. Although ‘9/11’ was still a year away, the American Embassies in East Africa had been bombed in 1998 and violent conflicts simmered in many parts of the world. At just about the same time, bitter civil wars, resource-centred conflicts and intraethnic strife raged in West Africa. Against the background of research being undertaken at King’s College London, 1. the mutually reinforcing links between ‘radicalisation’ and ‘violence’ (potentially sensitive terms, discussed below) in West Africa became clearly obvious and a successful application to investigate this was submitted to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 2. This Special Issue contains articles emerging from that work, with a set of country studies complemented by overarching synthetic analysis.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsd20hb201

The convergence and divergence of three pillars of influence in gender and security

This article explores the convergence between three pillars of influence – feminist security studies, civil society activism and policy decision-making – and its role in the adoption and implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325. It argues that these three pillars, individually and collectively, have made important contributions to the debate and action on the gender and security agenda, but that they remain organically disconnected. Their convergence has the potential to achieve path-breaking results in the sphere of gender and security, whilst their divergence makes transformation unattainable. We show the disconnect in the application of UNSCR 1325 in Africa and argue that this is partly the reason why, despite enormous efforts, the gains realised in terms of gender equality in the peace and security arena have been negligible.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rasr202016-06-30hb2016Political Science

Shifting ideas of sustainable peace towards conversation in state-building

This article offers reflections on the meaning of peace and peace-building in Africa and proposes a reframing of the state-building problematic. It argues for a shift in analytical lens by providing alternative ways of looking at state-building in order to explore a different approach to peace-building. Thus, the paper re-centres the notion of conversation in the processes of building peace and state. This concept of conversation requires a shifting of the debate from a focus on which institutions, liberal or otherwise, and which policies are most effective for peace, to how inter-elite and society-elite conversation gives rise to, or fails to bring about particular ensembles of institutions and policy outcomes. We analyse the role of political settlement in shaping the nature and outcome of these conversations. We suggest that the pursuit of peace must account for the depth of conversation about the presence, absence or desire for peace as well as accompanying perspectives of state-building across the target society.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsd20hj2022Political Science

Women’s overlooked contribution to Rwanda’s state-building conversations

This paper does not directly engage the state-formation, political settlement and state-building debates in Africa but it foregrounds the notion of conversation as the lens through which to examine Rwanda’s state-building history. In particular, it explores an overlooked perspective from Rwanda’s state-building trajectory by focusing on a particular class of actors – women – whose voices also contributed to inter-elite and elite-society state-building from pre-colonial times. The paper examines how and why conversible spaces have been created in post-genocide Rwanda that are locally conceived yet given form by Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) elites. It shows that these spaces are progressions of a long history of state-building conversations in Rwanda that pre-date colonialism. The paper asks how and why have conversible spaces for peace and state-building evolved over time? To what extent do their contemporary form have the potential for being genuinely transformative? What do these processes mean for future peace and state building in Rwanda? In addressing these questions, this paper foregrounds women’s agency and contributions to state-building in Rwanda over time. It shows that while there is evidence that women’s agency has evolved from covert to overt spaces, limitations to women’s influence of peace-building and state-building conversations still exist particularly for those whose visions of society diverge from that of the ruling party Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsd20hj2022Political Science