Cross-border peacebuilding

Whose peace is it anyway? connecting Somali and international peacemaking

Feb 2010
Accord 21, Whose peace is it anyway? connecting Somali and international peacemaking, seeks to improve understanding and links between Somalis and international policy and practice. Edited by Mark Bradbury and Sally Healy it contains over 30 articles including interviews with Somali elders and senior diplomats, and contributions from Somali and international peacemaking practitioners, academics, involved parties, civil society and women’s organisations.

Somalia

Accord 21 seeks to improve understanding and links between Somalis and international policy and practice. Edited by Mark Bradbury and Sally Healy it contains over 30 articles, including interviews with Somali elders and senior diplomats from the African Union, the UN and IGAD; and contributions from Somali and international peacemaking practitioners, academics, involved parties, civil society and women’s organisations.

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders

Jan 2011
War does not respect political or territorial boundaries. This twenty-second Accord publication looks at how peacebuilding strategies and capacity can ‘think outside the state’: beyond it, through regional engagement, and below it, through cross-border community or trade networks. Edited by Alexander Ramsbotham and I William Zartman, Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders includes 20 case studies from Asia, Europe and the Caucasus, to East, Central and West Africa, Central America and the Middle East. Articles also explore cross-border peacebuilding from global, systems analysis and legal perspectives, and focus on themes ranging from politics, governance and security, social and community relations, and trade and natural resources.

Conclusion - promoting 'trickle-up': linking sub- and supra-state peacebuilding

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
Alexander Ramsbotham and I William Zartman present the findings of the Accord publication, which suggest the need to ‘think outside the state’: beyond it, through supra-state regional engagement, and below it, through sub-state cross-border community or trade networks.

Why the Maghreb matters: threats, opportunities and options for cross-border cooperation in North Africa

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
I William Zartman looks at trans-border conflict in the Maghreb, where the solution is obvious: regional cooperation among the neighbouring countries would increase the economic welfare of all of them significantly. Instead, there is endemic rivalry among them and specifically a dispute over the decolonised territory of Western (formerly Spanish) Sahara that blocks cooperation, keeps borders closed, and fuels costly competition in trade and arms. Underneath this situation lies the fact that the central state, Algeria feels no need for enhanced economic benefits because of its oil cushion.

Cross-border water cooperation and peacebuilding in the Middle East

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
Annika Kramer states that scarce water resources have interacted with asymmetric power relations between Israel, Jordan and the occupied Palestinian territory. She suggests that water cooperation is not only essential for environmental and humanitarian reasons, but could contribute to peacebuilding and human security.

West African blood diamonds recognise no borders

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
In West Africa, diamonds were valuable assets in the regional conflict system, funding Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in Sierra Leone, and sustaining Charles Taylor’s grip on power in neighbouring Liberia. Alex Vines describes how regulating the ‘blood diamond’ trade through the Kimberley certification scheme has helped to de-link it from a regional war economy. The system is far from perfect, but the industry is in better shape than in the late 1990s.

Trade, development and peacebuilding in the African Great Lakes

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
Nicholas Garret and Laura Seay argue that while mineral extraction and trade is often portrayed as the driver of regional violence in eastern DRC, weak governance is in fact to blame and efforts to suppress the mineral trade ignore its developmental potential.

Trading for peace in Kashmir

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
Ayesha Saeed explains how trade across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir has helped to ‘soften’ the border and re-establish links between divided Kashmiri families, trading communities and civil societies. But the impact of the initiative has been limited as both an economic and a reconciliation enterprise, as traders have to use an inefficient barter system, and exchange of goods across the LoC takes place through intermediaries, leaving little people-to-people contact.

Section introduction - building peace below the state: cross-border trade and natural resources

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011
Diana Klein describes how economic or environmental cooperation across borders in pursuit of a shared goal can open trade channels that contribute to building trust, or establish interdependencies that provide incentives for cooperation and increase the costs of war.

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