Global Policy Forum

By the UN Economic Commission For Africa

Introduction

Peace and security is recognised as the absolute prerequisite for the establishment of an effective African Union and regional economic integration, alongside the attainment of good governance and economic development. In turn, developing the required doctrines, institutions, and processes to underpin regional peace and security is necessary for peace and security to be achieved.

Currently there is a multiplicity of initiatives for peace and security in Africa. They range from grassroots peacebuilding efforts, such as the 'People to People' reconciliation process in Southern Sudan and numerous peace education workshops, to issue-specific programmes such as measures to curtail the trade in small arms and prevent 'blood diamonds' from reaching the market. There are special peace initiatives such as the Burundi peace process, and subregional country-specific efforts such as the IGAD Sudan Peace Secretariat, as well as processes led by the OAU, such as the Ethio-Eritrean peace agreement. At a more general level there are subregional mechanisms to monitor indicators of insecurity, the OAU's Conflict Management Centre and the CSSDCA, and international efforts such as the African Crisis Response Initiative. There are military interventions and peacekeeping forces, such as those in Sierra Leone and DRC. There are livelihoods initiatives to rehabilitate war-affected communities, efforts to demobilise child soldiers, and World Bank-sponsored post-conflict reconstruction programmes. What do these efforts have in common? It seems that all are ad hoc responses to specific pressing problems. All are worthwhile. Some are well-coordinated-while in other cases there are poorly-managed or poorly-coordinated initiatives that cover the same ground. Overall, it is striking how conflict-related initiatives in Africa lack a theoretical blueprint for how to move Africa from its current state in which armed conflict is widespread, to a condition of prevailing peace and security. There are good reasons for this absence of an overall framework: conflicts are diverse, and the measures to combat them are equally diverse. Any attempt to straight-jacket conflict resolution and peace-building into a single framework runs the risk of sacrificing effectiveness to the intellectual fads of the day.

The current regional climate, including the decision to establish the African Union and the momentum underpinning NEPAD, indicate that the moment is mature for integrating existing peace and security issues within a unifying framework, in such a way that they retain their essential autonomy and dynamism, but complement one another more effective. The combination of the AU and NEPAD provides a framework for bringing peace and security issues together with the question of governance and constitutionalism (the core of the AU) and economic development and international partnership (the core of NEPAD). The overwhelming majority of Africans seek to live their lives in peace and security. Hence, the more they can be involved in specifying what peace and security is, and what can be done to promote it, the better. Essentially this entails a programme of democratising the entire agenda of peace and security, starting with the basic structures of government, and working outwards from there. This paper begins with an overview of the constraints on achieving peace and security in Africa, before turning to how this 'democratisation of the security agenda' strategy might be implemented.