The need for Adaptive Peace building
The last decade has seen an increase in the numbers and the intensity of wars and conflicts. Such evolution of war and [in]security over the years, has led to increasing exposure to changing methods designed to mitigate the fragility caused and exposed how methods of building peace have fallen short. The change in nature of such wars has defied most categorisations and understanding that have held the core to the definitions and understanding of ‘peacebuilding’.
Defining peacebuilding is not and has never been simple. The term has withstood the lack of a clear definition, and it remains a very fluid subject matter; this is because of the implications it carries. Who decides what peace that needs to be built is? Isn't this the problem, then?
With a working definition, many organisations set forth to conduct the act of ‘bringing peace to people who peace eludes’. This act is to strengthen a society's capacity to manage conflict in non-violent ways according to Interpeace, or to reduce a country's risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities.
Although there are slight variations in the definitions, I believe there are three main misconceptions about defining and thus conducting peacebuilding. First, the definition has always been a dependent concept, making it a binary concept because of its dichotomous nature. Peace then is an absence of war. This can cause one to mistake the absence of war as peaceful. Also, peace building has, for the most part, been understood (or depicted) as a field of external policy intervention. But many policies and practice to international peacebuilding have seen an increasing critique on how it is conceptualised and also understood. Many beneficiary countries of such programs have fallen back into conflict, and where peace manages to hang on, its sustainability is questioned because it privileges the elite. Recently, Mali and the DRC locals have protested the presence of MINUSMA and MUNOSCO peacekeeping missions.
The third misconception is that peace building is a universal characteristic. The caution here is to point out that then peacebuilding can be mistaken to mean that peace is an imported commodity, instead of nurtured, and in-built.
The need to understand the context in African peacebuilding
Western critical discussions surrounding peacebuilding and Africa are based on the fact that the dominant and moreperspectives of peace were not helping Africa find peace. This is mainly because of two reasons. First, peace in the African context remains elusive as peacebuilding has been approached in a universal manner, often packaged differently in various contexts. However, conflict context is very different in these countries. Some countries that have experienced dreadful violence include Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola, Liberia, , Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Algeria, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Rwanda to mention a few (Gordon-Summers, 1999; DFID, 2001). In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, government and armed resistance movements on opposite sides have split the country into two. While in Nigeria and Somalia, there is a presence of terrorist groups who have played a significant role in the conflict in most of these countries.
Second, this is because they only addressed limited perceptions and practices of peace, which were not serving Africa (Hansen, 1987). One of the major narratives is the characterisation of peacebuilding intervention in Africa by international actors that completely lack or have limited local knowledge and lived experience, which are essential to fully address complex conflict-related issues on the continent. This is the reality across many of the countries in Africa, where nearly half of the continent's now 54 countries are home to an active or recently ended conflict (Gettman, 2010), with half of those falling back into the same cycle of violence a while later.
More recently, a resort to local mechanisms to arrive at justice, peace and reconciliation called attention to assumptions underlying existing analyses external policy intervention. This stems from questions such as: how adequately do interventions capture the African people's experience of war and aspirations for peace? The answer is important for crafting policies aimed at transforming destructive and debilitating conflict and at building and sustaining peaceful societies. The trend also raises the question of what African knowledge systems have to offer in the ongoing project of theorising peace and conflict. It is thus necessary to examine the understandings of peace and war suggested by indigenous ideas (Omeje, 2017), thus capturing people’s experience of war in their everyday life. This can be seen in the DRC peace dialogue and the Wunlit Peace Conference in South Sudan.
Possible way forward: Peacebuilding as a societal affair
Beyond an understanding of peacebuilding from an African perspective, there is need to understand peacebuilding as a societal affair.
Despite peacebuilding being executed by either the international and national development agencies or local governments, there is still the presence of violent conflicts. These conflicts arising from politics, ethnicity, natural resource utilisation, religious radicalism, and chieftaincy disputes remain protracted, dreadful and difficult to resolve.
Since peacebuilding "is caught in a web of constituencies that have different and partly competing interests," it essentially becomes more about finding ways that these conflicting views and interests can be mitigated. Given the complexities on various contexts in various countries, there have been discussions of ‘an adaptive peacebuilding approach’ that is expected to embrace uncertainty, focuses on processes rather than states, and invests in the resilience of local and national institutions to promote change. The point has then to shift away from a linear understanding of peacebuilding and focus more on a non-linear approach that asserts the importance of ‘hidden agency’ within peacebuilding. A substantial part of this hidden agency is embedded in the social resilience within communities, examples include women’s movements such as the active political role that women in Libya played in the revolution of 2011 and, youth engagements, for instance, the role that young people played by calling for calm in Sierra Leone through different social and print media (Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, online news media, local radio stations and local newspapers.
In this light, more constructive approaches in which local and international stakeholders are involved in a complex system is needed. The idea here is a recognition of the importance of local actors who are increasingly being injected into the peacebuilding global agenda. This might not be as simple as it sounds. On one hand, there needs to be a constructive perspective on the local ‘realities’ while on the other, the understanding of local coming into a space that is ‘known as international space’ is still problematic because, well quite simply, says who? Despite this, many initiatives are trying to find ways to relate to the ‘international’ and the ‘local’ good and friction in a meaningful way.
It remains important to understand peacebuilding as a social construction within communities, both in method and concept of operations in its design. Just as civil wars are usually about failures of legitimate state authority, sustainable peacebuilding relies on its successful societal peace resilience (a communal design). Thus, peacebuilding is a societal affair and in its very nature, is non-universal.
Conclusion
Given the above, we are caught in a time when peacebuilding is at a crossroads and redefining and defining its boundaries. This is aimed at engaging more effectively within the peacebuilding context, and the recognition of the importance of inclusion of the locals to contribute as much as international peacebuilders. Therefore, many and various peacebuilding approaches need to offer opportunities to learn more about healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation, which create the basis for re-establishing social solidarity. However, this is still a challenge in the conceptualisation and practice of peacebuilding in order to bring this to fruition.
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