AFRICA: Academics offer ideas on building peace

At the end of 2005, the United Nations created an important meeting place for the growing number of activist academics trying to help states involved in strife make a smooth transition to civil societies. The UN Peacebuilding Commission, an advisory body of 31 governments, currently focuses on four African countries and is giving experts who know what it takes to rebuild conflict zones a means of delivering their ideas to policy-makers. Now if only those member countries can stop squabbling, the thinkers can get their work taken seriously.

The UN Peacebuilding Commission, or PBC, was established because there was - and in many cases still is - a vacuum in the area of building peace. When a conflict erupts, military and humanitarian aid often flows to the area to avert disaster. When the fighting dies down, the world's attention, and much of the money directed to peace-making, leaves and with it goes the chance of turning that society away from what may have created the conflict.

The PBC has tried to fill the gap that relief organisations remaining in the country can neither afford to tackle nor direct. It was created, along with the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, to bring together donors, financial institutions, national governments and countries contributing troops.

The commission helps to marshal these resources and proposes strategies for post-conflict peace-building and recovery, as well as to highlight any gaps that threaten to undermine peace. Currently, the PBC concentrates on four African countries: Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic.

But in a world where the Iraq war's democracy prescriptions created divisions between the Arab world and the West as well as tensions within Europe, remedies for scarred countries do not sit well with all leaders.

"It's a different climate. The relationship between member states has changed since Iraq," said Rahul Chandran, Associate Director for Statebuilding at the Center for International Cooperation at New York University.

President of the African Policy Institute Peter Kagwanja agreed: "Bickering has contributed to the slowdown in support for post-conflict peacebuilding efforts," he said in an email from Nairobi.

Kangwanja said peacebuilding efforts in countries emerging from calamitous wars had attracted little attention and resources from major nations in the UN Peacebuilding Commission.

But Chandran wants countries to support this important work. He said it was in all their collective and national interests to welcome an initiative in peacebuilding. Many conflicts needed the type of transition-like operation the PBC was designed to provide lest they fell back into war.

Without the right balance of military and civilian players on the ground after a conflict, a state was placed in a precarious position. Chandran offered East Timor as a recent example: "We pulled out too early," he said.

Chandran and Kagwanja are part of a group involved in the burgeoning field of peacebuilding. Many of those advising people who head think-tanks have worked with the UN and have an affiliation with a university so the commission has tried to bring them together to offer solutions.

Charles Call is another one involved. Call is a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace where he is investigating why peace fails to 'stick' in some cases of civil war and why it succeeds in others.

He said the PBC needed to listen to more than just government-friendly actors. "It should be providing a voice to the voiceless, developing and supporting the efforts of those groups that challenge governments not used to having their feet held to the fire."

All three men are putting some stock in the PBC as a better alternative than past relations between researchers and policy communities which Kagwanja describes as "a dialogue of the deaf". Call lamented that overall there had been little interaction between the north and south, leaving many African academics far away from research and policy hubs but he saw some hope in the kind of diversity in the groupings of those called on to advise the PBC.

Kagwanja, who has been conducting research on conflict on all four PBC countries but more closely on Burundi, welcomed this effort with cautious optimism. "There are positive developments, including constant communication, solicitation of inputs from African academics and deliberate efforts to involve them in projects in the post-conference period."

Call said the UN was looking to use the research emanating from gatherings such as a conference last December in Canada, where 60 attendees (including these three) helped bring some best practices for transitions after war. He said such meetings helped frame the issues and would be an important resource for the UN Secretary General when he addressed the UN General Assembly.

Among some of its key recommendations, the Ottawa meeting called for more capacity building of national research institutions. It also wanted consensus on the time when post-conflict peace-building should start. Another recommendation asked that the UN put in place public information strategies that informed and engaged people at the local level.

All three academics saw great importance in having more southern researchers involved in building peace.

"As a region with the world's most conflicts and post-conflict cases, Africa and its academics must become central players in this knowledge and in policy networks," said Kagwanja, adding that despite their potential for peacebuilding, universities had not been spared by conflicts.

"Resources, buildings and even books are destroyed by war. Professors have been killed, forced to flee or pauperised, making them unable to play their role in knowledge production." Kangwanja would like to see universities more involved in rebuilding post-conflict societies.

But in many countries, many universities are state-controlled and, while they might have swept some administrations into power and have potential to be hotbeds of dissent, they are neutered if they are in countries experiencing high political tensions.

For now, whether universities remain involved directly in peacebuilding or academics shout out from their think-tanks and their civil groups, the UN Peacebuilding Commission will try to take the work being done by these on-the-ground academics to where policy-makers will use their ideas to build more peaceful post-conflict countries.

philip.fine@uw-news.com