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.

This Handbook explores the ways in which religion among the African people has been applied in situations of conflict and violence to contribute to sustainable peace and development. It analyzes how peacebuilding inspired and enabled by religion serves as the foundation for sustainable development in Africa, while also acknowledging that religion can also be a tool of destruction, and can be used to fuel violence and underdevelopment. Contributors to this volume offer theoretical discussions from existing literature, as well as experiences of practitioners, to deepen the readers’ understanding on the role of religion and religious institutions in peacebuilding and development in Africa. The Handbook provides reflections on possible future developments as well, thereby aligning with the goals of SDG 16.

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.

This handbook fills a large gap in the current knowledge about the critical role of Africa in the changing global order. By connecting the past, present, and future in a continuum that shows the paradox of existence for over one billion people, the book underlines the centrality of the African continent to global knowledge production, the global economy, global security, and global creativity. Bringing together perspectives from top Africa scholars, it actively dispels myths of the continent as just a passive recipient of external influences, presenting instead an image of an active global agent that astutely projects soft power. Unlike previous handbooks, this book offers an eclectic mix of historical, contemporary, and interdisciplinary approaches that allow for a more holistic view of the many aspects of Africa’s relations with the world.

Africa lies at the centre of the international community’s peacebuilding interventions, and the continent’s rich multitude of actors, ideas, relationships, practices, experiences, locations, and contexts in turn shapes the possibilities and practices of contemporary peacebuilding. This timely new handbook surveys and analyses peacebuilding as it operates in this specifically African context. The book begins by outlining the evolution and the various ideologies, conceptualizations, institutions, and practices of African peacebuilding. It identifies critical differences in how African peacebuilders have conceptualized and operationalized peacebuilding. The book then considers how different actors sustain, construct, and use African infrastructure to identify and analyse converging, differing, or competing mandates, approaches, and interests. Finally, it analyses specific thematic issues such as gender, justice, development, democracy, and the politics of knowledge before ending with in-depth analyses of case studies drawn from across the continent. Bringing together an international line-up of expert contributors, this book will be an essential read for students and scholars of African politics, post-conflict reconstruction, security, and peace and conflict studies.

Peacebuilding in Contemporary Africa explores the challenges and opportunities faced by countries and societies transitioning from armed conflicts to peace in contemporary Africa. It evaluates the effectiveness, outcomes and failures of existing peacebuilding initiatives implemented by stakeholders, and proposes new strategies and approaches to facilitate the transition. The book investigates both micro- and macro-level conflicts in various parts of Africa, as well as the efforts made to resolve them and build peace. The book pays particular attention to grassroots-based micro-level conflicts often disregarded in peacebuilding literature, which tends to focus on macro-level, neo-liberal state reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts. The book adopts an evidence-based, policy-relevant approach to peacebuilding in Africa. The various chapter contributors offer a lucid analysis and critique of some of the prevailing paradigms and strategies of peacebuilding practiced in Africa. Together, the authors recommend innovative strategies to mobilise and coordinate governance institutions and partnerships at all levels (international, regional, national, and local) to prevent conflict escalation in volatile states and advance the rebuilding of violence-affected states and communities. Peacebuilding in Contemporary Africa provides a much-needed perspective from African scholars, and will be of interest to students, researchers, policy makers and practitioners with an interest in promoting legitimate policy interventions and sustainable peace in Africa.

This handbook explores the evolution of African education in historical perspectives as well as the development within its three systems–Indigenous, Islamic, and Western education models—and how African societies have maintained and changed their approaches to education within and across these systems. African education continues to find itself at once preserving its knowledge, while integrating Islamic and Western aspects in order to compete within this global reality. Contributors take up issues and themes of the positioning, resistance, accommodation, and transformations of indigenous education in relationship to the introduction of Islamic and later Western education. Issues and themes raised acknowledge the contemporary development and positioning of indigenous education within African societies and provide understanding of how indigenous education works within individual societies and national frameworks as an essential part of African contemporary society.

In this handbook, a diverse range of leading scholars consider the social, cultural, economic, political, and developmental underpinnings of peace. This handbook is a much-needed response to the failures of contemporary peacebuilding missions and narrow disciplinary debates, both of which have outlined the need for more interdisciplinary work in International Relations and Peace and Conflict studies. Scholars, students, and policymakers are often disillusioned with universalist and northern-dominated approaches, and a better understanding of the variations of peace and its building blocks, across different regions, is required. Collectively, these chapters promote a more differentiated notion of peace, employing comparative analysis to explain how peace is debated and contested.

This handbook provides critical analyses of the theory and practices of small arms proliferation and its impact on conflicts and organized violence in Africa. It examines the terrains, institutions, factors and actors that drive armed conflict and arms proliferation, and further explores the nature, scope, and dynamics of conflicts across the continent, as well as the extent to which these conflicts are exacerbated by the proliferation of small arms. The volume features rich analyses by contributors who are acquainted with, and widely experienced in, the formal and informal structures of arms proliferation and control, and their repercussions on violence, instability and insecurity across Africa. The chapters dissect the challenges of small arms and light weapons in Africa with a view to understanding roots causes and drivers, and generating a fresh body of analyses that adds value to the existing conversation on conflict management and peacebuilding in Africa. With contributions from scholars, development practitioners, defence and security professionals and civil society activists, the handbook seeks to serve as a reference for students, researchers, and policy makers on small arms proliferation, control and regulation; defence and security practitioners; and those involved in countering violence and managing conflicts in Africa.