Tag: conflict resolution

Are women a missing link in Africa’s peace process? Interrogating women’s involvement in peacebuilding and conflict resolution in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Africa

Are women a missing link in Africa’s peace process? Interrogating women’s involvement in peacebuilding and conflict resolution in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Africa

Posted by | Jun 8, 2026 |

This paper locates peacebuilding within the context of selected African countries with a focus on Zimbabwe; highlighting the intersection between gender and peacebuilding. The central argument in this paper is that gender relations and its relationship to peacebuilding in Africa must be understood within the context of the disruptions brought by European colonialism, struggles for self-determination and independence and post-independence struggles to construct new nation-states. The paper provides a sociohistorical analysis of gender relations in pre-colonial and colonial Africa and attempts to draw parallels with the postcolonial African state. It argues that a complex combination of these processes gave rise to exclusive, androcentric and elite driven peace processes in the postcolonial state. In examining women’s struggles for equality and social justice in the postcolonial state, the paper highlights how civic society and the civic space has come to be synonymous with women and women’s struggles to influence the peace process. Building on indigenous models of conflict resolution, the paper critically engages the concept of Ubuntu and appraises how it can be appropriated to re-insert women’s peace agency in postcolonial Africa. The paper concludes by examining options for increasing women’s involvement in conflict resolution and peacebuilding in postcolonial Africa.

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Media and Peacebuilding in Zamfara State of North-West Nigeria: A Study of an Armed Bandit Conflict

Media and Peacebuilding in Zamfara State of North-West Nigeria: A Study of an Armed Bandit Conflict

Posted by | Sep 28, 2021 |

This paper examined the ways radio contributed to peacebuilding and promotion using the case
of armed banditry and cattle rustling in Zamfara State. The study was guided by four specific objectives: to find out whether radio can be used as a mechanism of peacebuilding; to find out if the intervention by radio programs have influenced the escalation or de-escalation of armed bandits’ conflict in Zamfara; to examine the extent to which the people of Zamfara use radio as a mechanism of peacebuilding; and finally to survey the perceptions of people of Zamfara towards the use of radio in peacebuilding. The study used survey research design and data were gathered through a questionnaire administered to 338 respondents. The data were thematically analyzed by classifying major issues and recurrent themes. Then they were presented in narrative form. The findings of the study showed that radio served as an appropriate, cheap and easily accessible medium of passing peace messages; contributed considerably to the de-escalation of conflict; and reduced the frequency of conflict in the state. An overwhelming majority of the respondents (98%) agreed that radio has been the best medium for promoting peacebuilding. In conclusion, radio proves to be effective in dousing tensions and disseminating information on what needs to be done. Finally, the paper recommended that the government should formulate policies that make it possible to involve radio in conflict resolution efforts since it is cheap and easily accessible to many people.

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Appeasing the Land: Local Peace Committees and the Legitimation of Traditional Peacemaking in Kenya

Appeasing the Land: Local Peace Committees and the Legitimation of Traditional Peacemaking in Kenya

Posted by | Apr 5, 2019 |

In the last decade, the Kenyan state, reacting mainly to the 2007/2008 post-election violence and cases of intergroup conflicts, created local peace committees and conferred on them the rights to address specific disputes and prevent conflicts at the local level. Local peace committees are (superficially) modelled after social institutions deemed traditional, and are therefore an attempt to standardize an aspect of customary law. This article explores the ethnography of local peace committees in Enoosupukia, a former hotspot of interethnic clashes in Kenya. It relies on ethnographic data collected between 2014 and 2015 to describe the composition of local peace committees, discusses conflict resolution at the grass-roots level, and highlights their effectiveness and the emerging constraints on their performance. Although necessary in the resolution of local disputes through arbitration, local peace committees constitute hybrid governance arrangements, which tend to produce different modes of authority, operations, and legitimacy, with the possibility of intensifying clashes between traditional (informal) rules and formal law.

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