Violent Conflicts and Civil Strife in West Africa:Causes, Challenges and Prospects

The advent of intra-state conflicts or ‘new wars’ in West Africa has brought many of its economies to the brink of collapse, creating humanitarian casualties and concerns. For decades, countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea- Bissau were crippled by conflicts and civil strife in which violence and incessant killings were prevalent. While violent conflicts are declining in the sub-region, recent insurgencies in the Sahel region affecting the West African countries of Mali, Niger and Mauritania and low intensity conflicts surging within notably stable countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal sends alarming signals of the possible re-surfacing of internal and regional violent conflicts. These conflicts are often hinged on several factors including poverty, human rights violations, bad governance and corruption, ethnic marginalization and small arms proliferation. Although many actors including the ECOWAS, civil society and international community have been making efforts, conflicts continue to persist in the sub-region and their resolution is often protracted. This paper posits that the poor understanding of the fundamental causes of West Africa’s violent conflicts and civil strife would likely cause the sub-region to continue experiencing and suffering the brunt of these violent wars

Law and negotiation: a role for a transformative approach?

Feminist critique of negotiations that aim to bring about peaceful political settlements has consistently pointed to the glaring absence of the critical analysis of and response to gender relations as part of both the modus operandi and substantive output of those processes. Just as war is a gendered phenomenon war is a gendered phenomenon (working off gender relations that subordinate women), so too the processes that respond to it and aim to negotiate its end and create an aftermath, are inherently gendered. Where the goal is a peace that works for ‘everyone’, then negotiation needs to respond to structural gendered conditions that limit the potential that negotiation holds for women. The concept of transformation has been espoused by feminists as key to altering the structural inequalities that determine a systemic gendered order that works to de-privilege women and women's interests. As a concept, ‘transformation’ holds great potential to regenerate processes of negotiation towards promoting women's ability to have agency over their lives. This article begins a consideration of what transformation might mean for the practice of negotiation and how it might be advanced to make negotiations responsive to gender relations so that a peace that serves women as well as men is worked toward

From Crisis to Reform: Peacekeeping Strategies for the Protection of Civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The latest cycle of violence in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the brief occupation of Goma by the “M23” rebels call for a re-examination of how UN peacekeepers have approached the physical protection of civilians in the DRC over the past 13 years. This article examines how lessons from early protection crises led the UN missions in the DRC to develop a series of innovative tools for a better peacekeeping response based on improved civil-military coordination and enhanced communication with the local population. It analyzes how the need to mitigate the negative impact of joint UN-Congolese military operations led to a progressive shift from a largely UN-centric and troop-intensive approach to physical protection to a greater focus on the Congolese security forces. As the UN peacekeeping understanding of the protection of civilians – and its concomitant bureaucracy – continues to expand, peacekeeping strategies should refocus on strengthening national protection capacities through security sector reform. This article concludes that the 2012 crisis in DRC could serve as a trigger for such a shift, aimed at building legitimate institutions and encouraging the host government to shoulder its primary responsibility to protect its citizens. The new Intervention Brigade together with the Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework for the DRC and the region could provide the broader political strategy on which to anchor this reform process