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Conference: Sustainable Regional Peacebuilding in Africa: Practices and Disconnects

November 27, 2023 @ 8:30 am – November 28, 2023 @ 5:00 pm

Convenors: Interdisciplinary Fellow Group on Sustainable Regional Peacebuilding (IFG 9)

Programme

African regional organizations like the African Union (AU), ECOWAS and IGAD are increasingly important actors in resolving conflicts and building peace on the continent. In so doing, these organizations follow the aim of not only addressing the most immediate challenges to peace and security on the continent, but to also do so in a sustainable way, preventing future conflicts and creating the conditions for long-term peaceful societal coexistence. At the level of policy doctrines, sustainability has become a key concept in matters of peace and security and sustainable peacebuilding a guiding idea for how to build peace today. This effectively implements a key insight from peace and conflict research: that (societal) peace ultimately requires more fundamental transformations than the cessation of violence. But what is sustainable peacebuilding? And how can it be achieved under conditions of a complex web of actors involved in peacebuilding today?

Contrary to these policy ideas, the diverse peace and security practices of African regional organizations have been critiqued for so far predominantly focusing on the most immediate challenges and for favouring short-term and top-down measures at the expense of more long-term, integrative, and comprehensive engagements as laid out in the policy frameworks. Against this background, the conference engages the two interrelated questions: What does sustainable peacebuilding mean for different actors (local, national, regional, international, etc.)? And what are enabling and constraining factors for (more) sustainable peacebuilding by African regional organizations?

We will particularly explore the following themes:

Conceptions of sustainable peacebuilding: delving into different theoretical, practical, and vernacular understandings of the concept, including feminist, decolonial, and ecological approaches.

Local-international tensions in sustainable peacebuilding: exploring the intersection (or not) of different local, regional, and international priorities and understandings of sustainable peacebuilding, and how that may affect the achievement of sustainable peace.

Politics within African regional organizations around sustainable peacebuilding: analysing the internal dynamics of regional organizations, investigating their approaches and strategies towards sustainable peacebuilding and how politics within these organisations affect questions of peacebuilding sustainability.

Sustainable peacebuilding in the midst of violence: advancing a greater understanding surrounding the dynamics of implementing peacebuilding in the context of ongoing violence with a special focus on strategies to address violent extremism.

Thinking peacebuilding futures: exploring innovative and future-looking policy practices and research methodologies which will potentially influence the future of regional peacebuilding.

The conference will be organised around different thematic panels and will also include a keynote speech as well as a public, policy-oriented roundtable.

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