West Africa

The regional concertations process: Engaging the public

Owning the process: Public participation in peacemaking
Dec 2002
In 1994, Mali’s President Alpha Oumar Konaré initiated a series of countrywide open public meetings or ‘regional concertations’. Kåre Lode argues that the meetings laid the foundations for the successful inter-community meetings that followed.

Mali’s peace process: Context, analysis and evaluation

Owning the process: Public participation in peacemaking
Dec 2002
Kåre Lode describes how, given the failure of Mali’s official peace processes to bring peace, self-managed grassroots level inter-ethnic meetings resulted in localised peace accords and reconciliation, and how these were then integrated into the national peace process.

Democratising peacemaking processes: Strategies and dilemmas for public participation

Owning the process: Public participation in peacemaking
Dec 2002
Drawing on the rest of the publication, Catherine Barnes argues for broader public participation in peacemaking and defines the basic models through which this can happen.

Foreword: Accord public participation

Owning the process: Public participation in peacemaking
Dec 2002
Introducing the publication, Ed Garcia stresses the importance of drawing on local capacity as an essential complement to the work of governments and intergovernmental agencies in searching for a lasting peace.

Public participation

The process for making a transition from war to peace provides an opportunity to agree new political, constitutional and economic arrangements that can deal with the roots of a conflict. However such decisions are often made solely by governments and armed groups’ representatives, who do not always represent the wider public’s interests.

Accord 13 outlines approaches developed by government and civil society that open up the process to more people.

Owning the process: Public participation in peacemaking

Dec 2002

The process for making a transition from war to peace provides an opportunity to agree new political, constitutional and economic arrangements that can deal with the roots of a conflict. However such decisions are often made solely by governments and armed groups’ representatives, who do not always represent the wider public’s interests.

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.

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.

Security governance in the Mano River borderlands

Paix sans frontières: building peace across borders
Jan 2011

Peter Albrecht and Elizabeth Drew describe how poor border management has undermined legitimate cross-border movement and commerce in the Mano River Union (MRU), where informal cross-border trade in livestock or manufactured goods underpins many local livelihoods. Women are especially vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment by corrupt security services.

Cross-border peacebuilding

War does not respect political or territorial boundaries but forms part of regional conflict systems through dynamics that cross borders: refugee flows, nomadic armed groups like the LRA, narcotic or criminal networks, blood diamonds, or psycho-social ties.

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