Resources

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.

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.

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.

Powers of persuasion: Incentives, sanctions and conditionality in peacemaking

Feb 2008
Faced with the problem of how to respond to the challenges of intra-state armed conflict, international policymakers often turn to incentives, sanctions and conditionality in the hope that these tools can alter the conflict dynamics and influence the protagonists' behaviour. Drawing on case studies from around the world, Accord issue 19 suggests that while these instruments have in some cases helped tip the balance towards settlement, in many others they been ineffective, incoherent or subsumed into the dynamics of the conflict.

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