The threats to peace in Africa largely come not throughinterstate war but through conflict within nations. Peace in Africa will come only when Africans create and maintain diplomatic and military methods of keeping it. This report analyzes the myriad obstacles to conflict prevention in Africa and suggests those which might be susceptible to short- and medium-term removal. Africa's security situation will continueto deteriorate unless the nations of Africa take charge.

This book helps explain how and why there are such diverging outcomes of UN peace negotiations and treaties through a detailed examination of peace processes in the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Does it really matter what's written on page 36, protocol V, section III, point 5 of a UN-endorsed peace treaty? Dr. Miranda Ruwart Melcher shows that seemingly small details - such as who wears suits, who has toothbrushes, and how specific words are translated between French and English - can and have delayed peace or contributed to restarting wars. Dr. Melcher uses unique primary source data, including interviews with key actors who have participated in peace treaty negotiations, as well as thousands of previously newly opened UN documents. She argues that treaty specificity is an undervalued - but important - factor in researching the success or failure of peace processes. The book offers new insights and policy recommendations for key details whose presence or absence can have a significant impact on how peace processes unfold.

This volume offers an informed and critical analysis of the operationalization and institutionalization of the peace and security architecture by the African Union and Africa's Regional Economic Communities (RECs). It examines the institutions that will carry the mandate forward, raises pertinent research questions for the successful operationalization of the architecture and debates the medium and long-term challenges to implementation.

Does power sharing bring peace? Policymakers around the world seem to think so. Yet, while there are many successful examples of power sharing in multi-ethnic states, such as Switzerland, South Africa and Indonesia, other instances show that such arrangements offer no guarantee against violent conflict, including Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan. Given this mixed record, it is not surprising that scholars disagree as to whether power sharing actually reduces conflict. Based on systematic data and innovative methods, this book comes to a mostly positive conclusion by focusing on practices rather than merely formal institutions, studying power sharing's preventive effect, analyzing how power sharing is invoked in anticipation of conflict, and by showing that territorial power sharing can be effective if combined with inclusion at the center. The authors' findings demonstrate that power sharing is usually the best option to reduce and prevent civil conflict in divided states.

This handbook takes stock of the African Union’s Vision 2020 to rid the African continent of wars, civil conflicts, human rights violations, and humanitarian disasters – including violent conflicts and genocide – and provides recommendations on how to address contemporary threats to peace and security in Africa. It explores the continent’s current peace and security landscape, including new actors, emerging threats, and the prospects for achieving sustainable peace. With contributions from highly respected experts in the field, both academics and practitioners, the volume unpacks the sources of conflict, instability and the challenges of peace and development, and provides research-based policy advice to guide and inform African governments, policy makers, practitioners, and scholarly audiences on the continent and beyond.

As European security structures are undergoing transformation in the 1990s it is crucial to examine their origins and rationale: NATO secured peace and facilitated economic and political co-operation, while also becoming the vehicle of national rivalry. This book examines why and how NATO came into existence, and what its strengths and weaknesses were during its formative years. It draws conclusions from these experiences relevant to the reforms of Western security structures in the 1990s.

This book studies the processes which lead to explosion of civil strife and tries to spell out the policy options available to address the challenges faced by post-conflict economies. It calls for a more integrated policy approach which can gradually repair trust in public institutions as it addresses the vulnerabilities and grievances that helped start the process. Usually, such societies do not have the luxury of meeting the goals of security, reconciliation and development in a measured or sequenced manner: to avoid an immediate return to violence they must begin the recovery process on all fronts simultaneously.

The African continent is plagued by some of the most brutal and violent conflicts in the world. At the same time that warfare is changing, so has the state’s capacity to provide security and political stability to its citizens. This book deals with the role of regional organizations in Africa’s security. It focuses on three basic—yet often overlooked—questions: (1) the advantages and disadvantages of African regional and sub-regional organizations vis-à-vis other security mechanisms, (2) the official and unofficial reasons to intervene, and (3) whether security is actually protected by the peace activities carried out by the regional organizations. The contributors to the book—all leading researchers in the field—systematically assess and compare the role of the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This book was based on a special issue of African Security.

Africa has been and currently is the site of numerous conflicts and crises. Authors previously wrote of these as specifically African problems or the problems of Europeans in Africa, but newer scholarship on other aspects of Africa has come to stress the interconnectness of Africa and the wider world. Still, it has often been limited to studies of isolated instances within African countries, with little-to-no connection to greater patterns of international power and violence. This volume explores the historical and present local and international dimensions of the myriad security crises in Africa, from the role of international relations during liberation to multination efforts against piracy.

In this book 25 authors from the Global South (19) and the Global North (6) address conflicts, security, peace, gender, environment and development. Four parts cover I) peace research epistemology; II) conflicts, families and vulnerable people; III) peacekeeping, peacebuilding and transitional justice; and IV) peace and education. Part I deals with peace ecology, transformative peace, peaceful societies, Gandhi’s non-violent policy and disobedient peace. Part II discusses urban climate change, climate rituals, conflicts in Kenya, the sexual abuse of girls, farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria, wartime sexual violence facing refugees, the traditional conflict and peacemakingprocess of Kurdish tribes, Hindustani family shame, and communication with Roma. Part III analyses norms of peacekeeping, violent non-state actors in Brazil, the art of peace in Mexico, grass-roots post-conflict peacebuilding in Sulawesi, hydrodiplomacyin the Indus River Basin, the Rohingya refugee crisis, and transitional justice. Part IV assesses SDGs and peace in India, peace education in Nepal, and infrastructure-based development and peace in West Papua. • Peer-reviewed texts prepared for the 27th Conference of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) in 2018 in Ahmedabad in India.• Contributions from two pioneers of global peace research:a foreword by Johan Galtung from Norway and a preface by Betty Reardon from the United States.• Innovative case studies by peace researchers on decolonising conflicts, security, peace, gender, environment and development in the Anthropocene, the new epoch of earth and human history.• New theoretical perspectives by senior and junior scholars from Europe and Latin America on peace ecology, transformative peace, peaceful societies, and Gandhi’s non-violence policy.• Case studies on climate change, SDGs and peace in India; conflicts in Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico; Roma in Hungary;the refugee crisis in Bangladesh; peace action in Indonesia and India/Pakistan; and peace education in Nepal.