A herder is about to take his sheep to graze early in the morning in Mauritania, the West Sahel. Peacebuilding and stability in the region is dependent on solving the challenge of food and security, says the African Development Bank. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Nov 3 2020 (IPS)

In 2013, when Jamila Ben Baba started her company, the first privately owned slaughterhouse in Mali, she did so in the midst of a civil war as Tuareg rebels grouped together in an attempt to administer a new northern state called Azawad.

Ben Baba, who is originally from Timbuktu, in northern Mali — where much of the civil war conflict took place — based the business in the country’s western region of Kayes and grew it into what is considered the largest private slaughter house in the West African nation.

She started her business with a deep desire to develop one of the country’s first rural, raw resources — livestock.  Her aim was to promote Malian meat and to “make it known both in the sub-region and internationally”.

She said that while her business created 100 jobs, the company was evolving in a very difficult political and social context.

“War and Jihadists are rampant in the centre and north of Mali, which penalises us greatly in our livestock supply. Livestock farmers are forced to move constantly for their safety and that of their animals,” she said on Monday Nov. 2.

Ben Baba was speaking at the annual meeting of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, during which various stakeholders met to call on member states to increase funding to the commission’s Peacebuilding Fund. The Peacebuilding Fund is used as an instrument of first resort to respond to and prevent conflict.

But the impact of an Aug. 18 coup and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have placed the country in an unprecedented economic crisis, she said.

“Closed borders have slowed down our exports. Several purchase orders in Ghana and Guinea have been cancelled.”

Hotels that were closed during the pandemic restrictions caused her company’s turnover to drop by more than half, she said.

Ben Baba’s business success, and the success of other businesses and industries in the country and on the continent, is directly linked to peace.

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has “definitely already derailed Africa’s positive growth projectory and hit the poorest and most vulnerable particularly hard, especially in fragile states,” according to Khaled Sherif, the Vice-President, Regional Development, Integration and Business Delivery at the African Development Bank (AfDB), there remains “a direct link between poverty, and extreme poverty specifically, and terrorism, as is currently being witnessed in the Sahel”.

A report released by Amnesty International earlier this year noted that rife insecurity, food insecurity and more than 7.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance had left the region in crisis. In addition, the global coronavirus pandemic was expected to worsen the situation.

“The rise in violent extremism in the Sahel is linked to the conditions that the populations face in their daily lives. Many parts of the Sahel have never seen electricity, they have no access to potable water, education is at a premium, so these connects obviously lead to a deterioration of the security situation,” Sherif said during the same meeting.

He said that it was no surprising that in regions with chronic food insecurity, especially in Africa, “become unstable sooner or later”.

“We are all aware of the devastating consequences this means for peace, stability and social cohesion,” Sherif said.

But Ben Baba is convinced that her business could impact various factors of development within the country at different levels.

“From the bridges in our countryside, to the improvement of Mali’s balance of trade, with the creation of added value of course the creation of jobs in the Kayes region, which is usually the first region of emigration, especially for young people,” Ben Baba said.

A 2018 World Bank report showed that Mali needed to diversify its exports as “gold and cotton account for over 80 percent of total exports”. The report further suggested, “ an agriculture-based light manufacturing diversification strategy can deliver structural change by creating abundant and better paying jobs for low skilled Malians”.

Sherif called on the Peacebuilding Commission to address basic needs at a community level and to prioritise this accordingly.

“If generations of farmers are unable to get out of substance agriculture, there will always be a risk of conflict,” Sherif said. He said while there were many initiatives by development partners in this area, they all failed to reach the required scale.

“The Peacebuilding Commission should therefore focus on scaling up these interventions to avoid community pockets of fragility that lead to insecurity,” Sherif said.

He said that in Africa, where more than half the population of 1.3 billion live below the poverty line of less than $2 a day, “our priority has to be to create wealth and this takes us back to the reality of how we develop value chains,” Sherif said.

He added that the AfDB looked at the African Continental Free Trade Area as an opportunity to create a level of resilience.

But Sherif pointed out that on a continent of 54 countries, 26 countries had a GDP growth of 5 percent or more but in those same countries the GDP per capita was reducing, creating inequality.

“So how are African countries getting richer but the citizens of Africa are actually getting poorer? If we don’t address this issue, we are not addressing the basic reality of stability that is going to be a persistent problem, a perennial problem, that will affect Africa, especially fragile states, for many years to come,” Sherif said.

While there were many ways to address the issues, Sherif said he felt it was important “to start with the people and the communities that the live in, as this is where conflict ultimately manifests itself”.

He said that villages, towns, communities, local governments, municipalities could undertake certain measures to mobilise the needed investment to tackle the issues at the roots. 

“Our experience shows that food security can be enhanced locally by groups of producers getting together pooling cash resources and utilising local technologies to help with basic food processes. These are investments that can be done locally to create jobs and profit-sharing opportunities that enhance income.”

Ben Baba, however, pointed to the obstacles that women faced when accessing investment in her country.

“As a woman it’s very difficult to be involved in this very masculine world where the cultural barrier is very pronounced with prejudices against the female gender.

“Obtaining financing in a high-risk country remains complex,” she said. And if financing was given, the rates were too high that it would affect the company’s results, she explained.

“Indeed women know that the cultural problem in raising funds because of a lack of confidence in the female gender,” Ben Baba said.

She said that in order to convince one bank she had to invest almost 80 percent of a project’s equity, and despite this “we were very poorly supported by the banking network”.

“Malian industries are not very developed and those invested in by women are non-existent,” she said. “Attracting and convincing investors is almost impossible,” Ben Baba added.

But Sherif stressed that it was important to “find a model that is specific to regional development, that is specific to community development, that is specific to wealth creation, so we can begin to create a level of consumption based on increasing disposable income so we can begin to break this chain of lack of availability of growth of incomes, desperation and then lack of security.”

In a recorded message U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he saw great value in enriching the U.N.’s partnership with international monetary funds.

“Sustained support for peacebuilding cannot be delivered by any single actor. It requires a multi-layered strategy with several layers of financing; bi-lateral, multi-lateral and international financial insinuations working in concert,” he said.

Guterres urged donors to reverse a worrying trend and commit to spend at least 20 percent of official development assistance on peacebuilding priorities in conflict settings. 

“As the world seeks to recover from COVID-19, countries will require carefully designed and conflict-sensitive support to get back onto a sustainable micro-economic footing,” Guterres said.

But he said that the demands for the fund were far outpacing the resources.

“We’ve already had to scale back our target for 2020 by $30 billion,” Guterres said. Already some member states had responded to his call for unspent committed peacekeeping budget and he called on others to do so.

Guterres welcomed the work of both the World Bank and African Development Bank.

“It is important that these funds help tackle conflict drivers, reach marginalised areas and support key governance needs, especially those that create the conditions for private sector investment.”

Guterres said more could be done to advance innovate financing solutions for peacebuilding, including partnerships with the private sector.

But Sherif pointed out: “So long as we don’t solve the challenge of food and security, we haven’t solved the problem of fragility and we will continue to see one crisis after the other.”

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A graphic at UN headquarters in New York compares daily spending on arms versus peace. Credit: IPS UN Bureau.

By Jonathan Rozen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 3 2016 (IPS)

As the world struggles to respond to conflicts and the people fleeing them, UN insiders are also struggling to advance a ‘shift in mindset’ to help prevent these crises from happening in the first place.

“Part of the challenge is the way we have characterised the work of the UN as one of a first responder, fire-fighter, as an organisation that comes in when things fall apart,” Macharia Kamau, Permanent Representative of Kenya to the UN, told IPS. “As a consequence all of the institutions in the UN tend to be more reactive than preventive.”

To change this, a group of diplomats and UN staff are seeking to bolster the UN Peacebuilding Fund. This fund operates with an annual budget of roughly 100 million dollars, making small yet targeted investments to avert crises over the long-term.

“Conflicts are pushing UN system to its limits,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. “Without the Peacebuilding Fund, we will be forced to stand by as we witness the preventable loss of countless lives.” But the fund is dramatically under financed.

‘Bang for buck’

On September 21, the UN Peacebuilding Fund held a pledging conference for the fund’s continued operation. The contributions of 30 countries, however, only amounted to 152 million dollars – just over half of the 300 million dollar funding target.

“The rhetoric that we have on peacebuilding is way ahead of the willingness to face up to the challenges of delivering on peace,” said Kamau, who also serves as the Peacebuilding Commission chairperson. “Something fundamentally different needs to happen.”

This year’s budget for the UN’s 16 Peacekeeping missions is roughly eight billion dollars. Looking ahead, small investments by the UN Peacebuilding Fund could save money by preventing the need for expensive missions that respond to what are often already dire circumstances, argue proponents of peacebuilding.

But improved foresight and proactive investments may also have impacts beyond countries’ chequebooks.

“If we are able to stop these conflicts from emerging in the first place, much of what we see today in the refugee situation putting a lot of pressure on individuals and countries would of course not have happened in the first place,” said Olof Skoog, Permanent Representative of Sweden to the UN.

‘Sustaining peace’

The UN Peacebuilding commission is a relatively new arm of the UN, established only in December 2005. Its mandate widened in April this year with the adoption of two identical resolutions by the UN General Assembly and Security Council. These moved peacebuilding responsibilities beyond post-conflict recovery to include comprehensive efforts for more proactive conflict prevention and ‘sustaining peace.’

Sustaining peace is the “idea that this process of prevention is actually something that goes on from the early warnings … over the conflict stage … and the post-conflict,” Jan Eliasson, UN Deputy Secretary-General, told the Peacebuilding Fund pledging conference. It involves consideration for the whole range of social, political, and economic factors that may contribute to peace.

This links conflict prevention to the achievement of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030). For example, Goal 1 and Goal 10 – “No Poverty” and “Reduced Inequalities” – will not be possible without sustained peace.

According to the World Bank, the world’s poorest people are becoming increasingly concentrated in fragile areas affected by conflict and violence, as peaceful areas reap the benefits of development. By 2030, 46 percent of people in extreme poverty will live in fragile and conflict affected areas, up from 17 percent today, says the Bank.

“We are still in early days to say what [Agenda 2030] will look like in terms of implementation,” Helder da Costa, General Secretary of the g7+ association of developing countries affected by conflict, told IPS after a meeting on Goal 16. “If you really want to build peaceful societies … we need practical implementation on the ground.”

One of the Peacebuilding Fund’s investments provided two million dollars to register births of 350,000 children in Côte d’Ivoire. Without registration, these children, many of whom were born just before or during the recent conflict, would be left in “legal limbo” without access to social services, advanced schooling or employment.

While the Peacebuilding Fund has been involved with various initiatives in Côte d’Ivoire since 2008, this registration effort aims to promote national identity for improved social cohesion, strengthening the social fabric of the country.

Investment in the SDG’s will support the social, economic, and political conditions that may prevent conflict and sustain peace. This process, however, will take time and the UN Peacebuilding Fund is looking to make the immediate and targeted investments that may curb the potential for conflicts.

“Lets not be impeded by bureaucratic challenges … lets think outside the box and then try to help things at the country level,” da Costa continued. But in a large and complex institution like the UN, new and innovative ways of thinking do not easily gain political traction or financial backing. In some cases they may even be directly opposed.

The UN Security Council initially resisted the Peacebuilding Commissions’ role in conflict prevention, said Eliasson. They believed it was an “infringement” on their primacy as the UN body for peace and security matters. Even now, with the world’s compounding crises of conflict, climate change, and refugees, countries’ investments remain focused on reacting to crises rather than preventing them.

It is important to cover the urgent humanitarian needs of today, Skoog explained to IPS. “At the same time, it’s very important to get this shift going to avoid these conflicts in the first place.”

As the international body with the mandate to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” the UN’s credibility rests largely on its ability to prevent and resolve conflict. Nevertheless, too often violence is permitted to spiral out of control and endure.

The president of the General Assembly for 2016-2017 has said he will support the shift to a more proactive mindset of ‘sustaining peace’ and encourage additional contributions to the Peacebuilding Fund. But after January 1 2017, when the next UN Secretary General takes office, it remains to be seen how the new leadership will prioritise proactive conflict prevention and the ‘sustaining peace’ mindset.

Sustainable development and peace are linked, including through education. Credit: John Robinson/IPS

By Patrick Keuleers
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 2016 (IPS)

We tend not to worry when things are going well.

If people can take care of their daily business and send their kids to school without fear of violence, resolve disputes through a functioning justice system when the need arises, express their views both in private discussions and in public processes, feel they can truly contribute to decisions that affect their lives, and know effective institutions are in place to deliver basic services to their families and communities without interruption or the need for bribes, chances are they will be broadly content with the way their society is managed.

But, if any one of these public goods is absent, or if their access to safety, health, education or livelihoods are threatened, concerns are likely to be expressed quickly – and often very loudly.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognises the importance of these public goods as being at the heart of sustainable development. There is a strong focus on peaceful, just and inclusive societies in the 2030 Agenda – and explicit recognition that there can be no peace without sustainable development and no sustainable development without peace. Where safety is routinely and casually under threat, it will be impossible to generate lasting improvements in most aspects of people’s lives.

But what does this mean in practice? How do people know that their government is committed to progress on these issues – to consolidating existing strengths, and to generating further gains over time?

That is a valid question. Unlike other elements of the 2030 Agenda – access to health, education, and sanitation, for example, which were part of the previous Millennium Development Goals – commitments to peace, justice and inclusion have not been measured systematically before as part of a global agenda agreed by UN member states.

In an attempt to provide an answer to that question, a small group of member states started in the latter part of 2014 to test how best to define and measure these concepts in practice. Even before the final adoption of the 2030 Agenda – including Goal 16 on peace, justice and institutions – these countries had been identifying their priorities and experimenting with goals, targets and indicators to demonstrate progress.

The results of this “pilot” work – in Albania, Indonesia, Rwanda, Tunisia and the UK – are presented in a Final Report launched on 21 April. The Report contains interesting lessons about what it means to work with these fundamental but often elusive concepts, lessons which will be of interest to a much wider group of countries now that the 2030 Agenda is a reality, and implementation a priority for all Member States.

The pilot experiences emphasise the importance of many elements that will be central to all approaches: effective planning, sound institutional structures at the heart of government, and partnerships down to the most local level involving community based organisations and civil society, alongside government.

But one message that comes across very clearly from the pilot exercises is that there is no magic formula for demonstrating progress. Context matters and different countries will need to assess their particular needs and capacities for monitoring and implementation, using available tools and developing approaches to measurement that are considered appropriate for the majority of the stakeholders affected.

The 2030 Agenda contains the shared commitment from all UN Member States to keeping people safe, to ensuring the fair administration of justice in accordance with the rule of law, and to building genuinely inclusive institutions which provide people a voice in the decision-making processes that affect them.

Global indicators will provide a snapshot each year of how successful we are as a global community. But alongside this global framework, there is ample space for different approaches at the national and local level, allowing countries to demonstrate how they are making society more peaceful, just and inclusive for all people – especially those most at risk of violence, injustice and exclusion.

The pilot countries gave us a head start, showing that with the right level of dedication, building peaceful, just and inclusive societies is both feasible and measurable.

Patrick Keuleers is Director of Governance and Peacebuilding, UNDP Bureau for Policy and Programme Support

By Mairead Maguire
BELFAST, Jul 13 2015 (IPS)

The year 2015 marked the 62^nd anniversary of the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War. The temporary ceasefire has never been replaced with a peace treaty and the demilitarised zone (DMZ) continues to divide the country.

The DMZ with its barbed wire, armed soldiers on both sides, and littered with thousands of explosive landmines, is the most militarised border in the world.

Mairead Maguire

Seventy years ago, as the Cold War was brewing,  the United States unilaterally drew the line across the 38^th parallel – with the former Soviet Union’s agreement – dividing an ancient country that had just suffered 35 years of Japanese colonial occupation.

Koreans had no desire to be divided, or decision-making power to stop their country from being divided; now, seven decades later, the conflict on the Korean peninsula threatens peace in the Asia-Pacific region and throughout our world.

One of the greatest tragedies arising out of man-made ‘Cold War’ politics and isolation is the tearing apart of Korean families and their physical separation from each other. In Korean culture, family relations are deeply important and many families have been painfully separated for 70 years.

Although there was a period of reconciliation during the Sunshine Policy years (1998-2007) between the two Korean governments, when some families had the joy of reunion, this has stopped due to a souring of relationships between North and South Korea.

Through sanctions and isolationist policies put in place by the International community, the North Korean people and their economy have also continued to suffer.

While North Korea has come a long way from the 1990s when up to one million died from famine, many people are poor, and feel isolated and marginalised from South Korea and the outside world.“I must admit that before this visit, my first to the North, I never realised how deeply passionate North Koreans are for reunification with the South and how much they want to open the borders so they can welcome their South Korea families to visit and normalise relationships”

As members of the one human family, and in order to show human solidarity and empathise  with our North Korean family, to bring global attention to the ‘forgotten’ Korean war, and to call for an engagement with North Korea and a peace treaty,  a group of international women came together to visit North/South Korea and walk across the DMZ.

On May 22, 2015, International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament, thirty women peacemakers from 15 countries made a historic crossing of the two-mile-wide DMZ from North to South Korea.

The delegation included feminist author/activist Gloria Steinem, two Nobel peace laureates,  Leymah Gbowee and myself, coordinator Christine Ahn (whose dream it was  to cross the DMZ) and  long-time peace activists, human rights defenders, spiritual leaders and Korean experts.

During our four-day  visit to North Korea, before crossing the DMZ on May 24, we had the privilege and joy of meeting many North Korean women.

At a peace symposium in Pyongyang, we listened as North Korean women spoke of their horrific experiences of war and division, and listened as some of our delegation shared how they had mobilised to end conflict and build peace in their communities.

We also participated in huge peace walks in Pyongyang and Kaesong, with the participation of many thousands of North Korean women in beautiful traditional Korean costumes. The women carried banners calling for the reunification of families and of Korea, a peace treaty and no war.

The walks were deeply moving, especially in Kaesong where families came out onto their balconies to wave as we passed.

I must admit that before this visit, my first to the North, I never realised how deeply passionate North Koreans are for reunification with the South and how much they want to open the borders so they can welcome their South Korea families to visit and normalise relationships.

North Koreans told us that Korean people are one people. Though they have different political ideologies, they speak the same language, have the same culture, and share a painful history of war and division.

Policies of isolation have not solved any problems and our delegates believe that a new approach of engagement and a peace treaty is necessary.  

Our walk brought renewed attention to the importance of world solidarity in ending the Korean conflict, particularly since the 1953 armistice agreement was signed by North Korea, (South Korea did not sign) China and the United States on behalf of the U.N. Command that included sixteen countries.

It helped highlight the responsibility of the international community, whose governments were complicit in the division of Korea 70 years ago, to support Korea’s peaceful reconciliation and reunification.

The challenges of overcoming Korea’s division became apparent in the complex negotiations over our DMZ crossing between North and South Korea, as well as with the U.N. Command, which has formal jurisdiction over the DMZ.

Although we had hoped to cross at Panmunjom, the ‘Truce Village’ where the armistice was signed, we decided, after both South Korea and the U.N. Command had denied our crossing, that we would take the route agreed by all parties in the spirit of compromise lest our actions further strain already tense North-South relations.

In Seoul, we met with some opposition. Although we did not meet with any heads of state or endorse any political or economic system, maintaining a neutral stance throughout, it was apparent that divisions within South Korea itself were manifested in some of the ideologically divided forms of reception and reactions that we witnessed.

We recognise that our international women’s peace walk is only a beginning and we will continue our focus on increasing civilian exchanges and women’s leadership, highlighting the obligation of all parties involved to decrease militarisation and move towards a peace treaty.

We therefore urge increased engagement at every level – civil, economic, cultural, academic and governmental – and especially citizen-to-citizen diplomacy in peacebuilding, as an alternative to full military conflict, which is not an option. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Hardeep S. Puri
NEW YORK, Jun 5 2015 (IPS)

Seventy years since its inception, the United Nations remains at the core of the multilateral system. The world body, together with the Bretton Woods institutions, was conceived in the mid-1940s by the architects of the postwar order with the central aim of saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war on the one hand, and the need to reconstruct and revive the global economy on the other.

Ambassador Hardeep S. Puri. UN Photo/Evan Schneider

This was a Westphalian model based on the principle of the sovereign equality of states and a defined concept of inter-state relations. With marginal changes, the system has survived, displaying a remarkable endurance to different geopolitical contexts and crises: from the bipolarity of the Cold War to the decolonisation process.

Despite the resilience shown – and despite its unparalleled convening power – the United Nations continues to face multiple challenges and grapple with the fast-evolving and unprecedented complexity of the current global landscape. In fairness, the speed and nature of change would be hard to handle for any decision-making process.

The fact that the decision making space is occupied both by the Secretary-General and a large bureaucracy and 193 member states does not make it any easier. Very often this creates a sprawling gap between the manifestation of a crisis and the time needed for a response.

Indeed, ever so often global governance structures are perceived to be out of step with emerging needs and the systemic challenges of globalisation. The inter-connectedness of economies and societies means that risks are more contagious and crises reverberate across issues and borders, whether they relate to health, refugees, violence or – more often – all three at the same time.

This being the case, it stands to reason that responses to crises also have to be global requiring the cooperation, consent and co-ordination of a large number of independent, sovereign member states.As agents of chaos continue to challenge the forces of order, the international system finds itself at a crossroads that calls for a serious re-evaluation of the bedrock of today’s so-called multilateral environment.

The system itself is not alone at fault. Its central constituents – member states – have rendered the system increasingly contested, unused and thus of limited capacity to deal with the emerging threats to world peace, stability and security.

Such a trend is epitomised by the breakdown of consensus and decision-making at the highest political level: the Security Council, has invited criticism when it authorised the use of force in Libya and when consensus could not be achieved resulting in inaction in Syria, Yemen and Ukraine.

As agents of chaos continue to challenge the forces of order, the international system finds itself at a crossroads that calls for a serious re-evaluation of the bedrock of today’s so-called multilateral environment.

How can faith be restored in the value of collective engagement? What innovative policy options can emerge from an increasingly complex and confusing backdrop? Can crisis be the mother of opportunity?

A number of major reviews and intergovernmental discussions are taking place this year on a broad range of topics including peace operations, peacebuilding, the Sustainable Development Goals, financing for development, climate change, humanitarian affairs, the future of the European security architecture, and the implementation of Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, among others.

As these review processes develop on related but separate tracks, it remains important to reflect upon the connections among them. More importantly, member states will need to step up their effort when it comes to implementing these reforms.

As Secretary General of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism (ICM), an independent audit of the U.N. and wider multilateral system by former and serving statesmen, Ambassadors, and other eminent persons, I see the ICM not only as one part of this continuing process of reform but also a key vehicle to consider how said reform initiatives can be best implemented.

This is not designed to produce a 21st century utopia. It is a more practical exercise than that. The ICM seeks to provide the international community with a range of options on how the U.N. best remains “fit for purpose” against the new challenges confronting the system.

It is clear that only incremental approaches to reform will work. Those couched in humility and with a clear purpose and acceptability are more likely to succeed. The suggestion that all is well with the system and that there is no need in fact to fix it has very few takers.

In other words, where and to what extent does the system need to be tweaked to make it genuinely ‘fit for purpose’? A system that has evolved over seven decades must have many qualities. The cliché that if you did not have the U.N., you would need to invent one is equally true.

Looking back 70 years, more specifically, the closing session of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, we should keep President Truman’s words close to us when he asserted that “the Charter….will be expanded and improved as time goes on…changing world conditions will require readjustments”. In other words, the mandate for reform lies in the act of creation itself.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The Security Council debate on women, peace and security in October 2014. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 16 2015 (IPS)

2015 marks anniversaries for two significant commitments made to increasing women’s participation at peace tables.

Yet despite the Beijing Platform for Action and the Security Council Resolution 1325 both committing to increasing women’s participation in peace building 20 and 15 years ago, respectively, there has been very little progress to report.

The latest available statistics show that women made up only 9 per cent of negotiators at peace tables between 1992 and 2011. That the most recent data is from 2011 shows that more work is needed even in basic areas such as data collection and reporting of women’s participation in peace building.

IPS summarises here four reasons we should value women’s participation at the peace table more, based on discussions at the 59th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) over the past week.

1. Women Bring Commitment and Experience to the Peace Table

Often the first people invited to participate in formal peace negotiations are the people holding the guns and the last are women who have expertise in building lasting peace.

Zainab Bangura, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, told a CSW side event on Tuesday last week, “In the Central African Republic, the only community where they were not killing each other was a community where the Christian women said, ‘These Muslim women are our sisters.’

“Why? Because the women in the community said, ‘We have lived together for the last 100 years’,” Bangura said.

In the Phillipines, Irene Santiago was a member of the government panel that negotiated peace with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Santiago came to the table with years of experience working with Christian, Muslim and Indigenous women leaders for peace.

Speaking at a CSW side event at the International Peace Institute (IPI) on Thursday, Santiago said that she knew that her years of experience working with civil society for peace stood her in good stead to make a significant contribution to formal peace negotiations, which she did.

Speaking with IPS, Santiago said women’s voices not only have to be heard, but that they also have to be acted on.

“For women. It’s almost never always about themselves, it’s always about our children, our husbands but also about our communities,” Santiago told IPS.

In Africa, women have fought to be included in peacemaking, even when their contributions have not been recognised.

Bineta Diop, Special Envoy on Women Peace and Security to the African Union, says that mediators need to be held accountable when they only invite the people who hold guns to the peace table and ignore women’s contributions.

“I have been involved in many crises where women were knocking at the door and saying we want to be at the table,” Diop said.

Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, known as the father of Security Council Resolution 1325, said that the determination of African women to be involved in peace negotiations should be seen as an inspiration by other countries.

Despite serious difficulties, war and conflict, African women have shown continued determination to hold their countries accountable, Chowdhury said.

2. Gender Equality in Peace Time Prevents Conflict

Also speaking at the IPI, Valerie Hudson, co-author of ‘Sex and World Peace’, said that her research has shown that the way women are treated within a country is one of the most accurate indicators of the quality of relations that country will have with other countries.

Diop agreed with Hudson, saying that countries that are likely to fall into conflict have higher levels of discrimination and inequality.

“Discrimination against women, especially the non-participation and non-inclusion of women in democracy is … one of the root causes of the conflict,” Diop said.

Ambassador Choudhury agreed with these sentiments, telling IPS, “I believe that no country can claim that their country is not in conflict if women’s rights are denied, if women’s equality is not ensured, if women’s participation at all participation levels is not there.

“I think that if we women are violated, if women’s equality of participation is not there we cannot say that we are at peace, we are in conflict with ourselves. This is a conflict which is happening within ourselves and within the countries. We don’t have to go into the traditional description of conflict, civil conflict or fighting with another country,” Chowdhury added.

Dr. Youssef Mahmoud, Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute also speaking at the IPI event said, “A world where 51 per cent are ignored is a dangerous world for everyone. I can’t imagine why any men would be indifferent to this.”

3. Women Are Active In Civil Society

Several discussions at the CSW questioned why militaries were the primary actors in peace building, while non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society’s expertise was not called on.

Santiago told IPS that civil society, especially women, have a lot to contribute to humanise, to concretise, and to make peace negotiations relevant to people’s lives.

Winnie Kodi from the Nuba mountains in Sudan told reporters on Monday that civil society was vital to helping indigenous communities like her own that have been affected by conflict. She said that the main way her people were able to have their voices heard was by working together with NGOs and civil society.

Chowdhury told IPS he is advocating for the U.N. and governments to hold more consultations with civil society, saying that the involvement of women and of civil society is very important.

Santiago also called for renewed focus on the important role of NGOs in the area of women, peace and security,

“Again I see that why are we focusing on the UN as the locus of change,” she said. “To me it is not, it is the means, it is an important audience, but it is not the locus of social change.

“Let us form the global civic networks that we need to bring about the local global and civil change that we need” Santiago said.

4. Women Challenge The Causes of Conflict

Challenging militarism and militarisation was another theme discussed during the first week of the CSW, particularly by civil society groups at the parallel NGO forum.

Choudhury told IPS that increased militarism and militarisation is slowing down efforts for equality. “Increasing militarism and militarisation has really been effecting women in a very negative way. This is something that women should stand up against, we should all stand up against,” Chowdhury said.

Militarisation is also affecting indigenous women and men. Maribeth Biano, from the Asian Indigenous Women’s Network, told reporters on Monday that Indigenous women are hugely affected by militarisation in Indigenous territories.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

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By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

Western analysts all too often take a distorted and reductionist approach to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), says Kai Koddenbrock, who analysed more than 50 policy papers for a study published in the journal International Peacekeeping in November 2012.

Courtesy of Kai Koddenbrock

In an interview with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Koddenbrock said the DRC is portrayed again and again as a “sick country” with “sick people” instead of accurately reflecting the diverse realities on the ground.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: The degree to which analysts and particularly Western think tanks have reduced realities and complexity on the ground in DRC “beyond what is required for description and intelligible communication”, as you wrote, results in a “functional pathologisation” of the Congolese society and its population. Could you elaborate on that?

A: Functional pathologisation refers to the relationship between the way think tanks and intervention actors analyse the Congo and the fact that simultaneously the assumption is made over and over again that Western organisations are urgently needed to deal with these self-identified problems.

Peacebuilding and other international actors approach the Congo and its people in a way that stresses their seeming problems and weaknesses and portrays it as a sick country with sick people only. By doing so, these outside actors create the impression that it is these outside actors that are urgently needed to overcome these supposed problems.

If policy papers and interveners were more respectful and appreciative of Congolese actors of all kinds, outside intervention would appear less natural and the abilities of the Congolese themselves to get things done would move to the forefront.

Q: What are the underlying reasons for this pattern you found in your analysis?

A: This is a difficult question. Racism and historical continuities in the ways of approaching the Congo and Africa more broadly probably play a role. The logic of the think tank market, where advice needs to be short and easily digestible, is decisive, too.

Think tanks sell ideas and decision-makers spend little time. For these reasons, reports have to reduce complexity. This is not a bad thing in itself, but the way this is done matters. If all kinds of rational and purposeful Congolese acts disappear in the course of simplifying, there is a problem.

I think that even all-out military occupations like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are not successful as long as they do not manage to take the existing priorities and ideas of the existing government and relevant powerbrokers into account. This is a tough thing to do – especially if the power structure of the country and the region is hard to understand.

Security sector reform (SSR) in the Congo, for example, has failed for many years because President Kabila was not interested in it. Maybe this is changing at the moment. This means for peacebuilding that the relevant actors need to be on board: the Congolese government, the Rwandan government, the Angolan government, the South African government, customary chiefs and influential business people and various armed groups of the East and the ordinary Congolese.

Q: What should be done differently when analysing DRC and its peacebuilding processes, with their local, regional and international implications?

A: Analysts and think tanks follow trends because new work needs to be different than prior work to grab the readers’ attention. This is very visible in current Congo analysis.

Thanks to the good work done by Séverine Autesserre, for example, analysts now focus a lot more on local conflict than 10 years ago. However, I would argue they might focus too much on local conflict, as the recent controversy about the latest ICG [International Crisis Group] report showed. International and regional factors do play a very important role still.

What remains the same throughout all these shifts in focus from “elections will build the Congo” to “local peacebuilding” or the “international brigade” now is that the government in Kinshasa and the provincial government remains a curious blind spot.

The examples I provide in the paper are quite concrete, I think. Kabila deals with IDPs, strikes deals with Rwanda and manages the mines to a certain degree. This is more than “Congo is a failed state” or has no government. Analysts have repeatedly assumed during cyclical violence in the East that now this will be the end of the Kabila government. He is still there. How come? No analyst really deals with that.

This is part of what I see as “functional pathologisation”, which I tried to show in the paper. That Congolese – even the government’s acts – might actually make sense is never considered. This renders the analysis very one-sided and helps to sustain the belief, again, that it is up to Western NGOs, or the U.N. to improve situation in the Congo.

Excerpt:

M23 rebels near Sake, Eastern DR Congo. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

Despite existing local expertise and strategies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to build peace-supporting structures at the community level, official debates and media coverage continue to focus predominantly on military interventions.

“Local actors work in isolation and their actions are not part of a global peacebuilding process in the DRC. Their recommendations and their work on the ground are not taken into account,” Eric Malolo from Reseau Haki na Amani (RHA), a network of civil society organisations, told IPS.“Violence becomes a means of expression when there is no framework of reference." -- Suliman Baldo of ICTJ

As the coordinator of RHA, Malolo works in Orientale, a province in the northeast. RHA was founded in 2004 as a direct response to ethnic tensions between the Hema and Lendu communities in DRC’s Ituri region.

Its objective is to help reconcile these two tribes and to address frequent conflicts over land, with dialogue-supporting initiatives at the community-level.

“Barzas” – large community meetings organised by RHA – proved to be a very useful tool, enabling local populations to develop a deeper understanding of local conflict dimensions and how these are perceived by the different groups living in the same community.

“Most problems identified during these gatherings do not necessarily find a solution, but the main thing is letting the communities speak out and enter a process of intercommunity and pacific coexistence,” Malolo said.

Not only are locals working and living in the affected communities not sufficiently involved in ongoing peacebuilding efforts in the central African country, they often also lack political support.

In the context of property and identity-related conflicts, Malolo said, politicians are generally elected because they campaigned on a platform of protecting their own ethnic community’s interests.

“A latent intercommunity conflict is the reason for the presence of such extremist politicians,” he said. “To not risk these votes, they hinder decisively ongoing reconciliation process between communities.

“Even administrative staff receives instructions from politicians to stop the conflict resolution process started by some local actors. Or in other words, efforts started by local actors are often blocked by politicians who don’t agree with this kind of change,” he added.

Most experts agree that to be effective, peacebuilding requires intertwined processes and structures that run from the grassroots to the national level – especially in deeply fragmented and traumatised societies like the DRC.

But a look at official policymaking appears to prove Malolo’s point. The new Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework (PSCF) agreement for DRC, an accord signed by 11 African heads of state in Addis Ababa in February, has “no mention of local civil society and it was not prepared with any involvement of those local actors,” Maria Lange, DRC country manager at International Alert, a London-based charity, told IPS.

“The domestic oversight committee established by the DRC government for the implementation of the domestic commitments under the PSCF does not include any civil society representatives – these are limited to a parallel monitoring committee which has no decision-making authority,” she said.

A military emphasis

Even though the peace agreement represents an important milestone, Aloys Tegera from the Pole Institute regards the military approach backed up by the international community with scepticism.

The U.N. Security Council’s creation in March of its 3,000-strong “first-ever ‘offensive’ combat force“, alongside the 20,500 peacekeepers already in the country, was hailed by the political elite and raised expectations among Congolese “which cannot be met”, Tegera told IPS.

People are bound to learn that realistically, a political solution is the only way forward, said the research director at the Goma-based think tank.

“When I read the current military discourse of many Congolese, however, I am afraid to say that 20 years of suffering and wars have not taught us much,” he said.

For Tegera, the conflict is rooted in a “deadly triangle” of “identity, land and power”.

Where to find the most critical conflict-drivers – inside or outside the country – to what extent they matter and how to tackle them are still controversial questions. What is clear is that a myriad of local, regional and international actors pursue their own interests, and fall back on violence as an instrument to enforce them.

This is often carried out by local armed actors such as militias and rebel groups, who are characterised more often than not by a lack of political ideology, said Suliman Baldo of the New York-based International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ).

“They are fictitious creations of whoever is intervening and mainly of these very greedy neighbours,” the director of ICTJ’s Africa Programme told IPS.

At the community and provincial levels, in an atmosphere of localised violence, these groups have gained the upper hand, overruling traditional leaders who would be more disposed to resolving conflicts “traditionally”, that is to say, through dialogue and accommodation with other groups.

“Violence becomes a means of expression when there is no framework of reference. There is no state to settle disputes among the population, there is no traditional authority to moderate tendencies towards violence and to find solutions and resolutions for problems within or among different groups,” Baldo explained.

Concluding that there is a power vacuum at the local level, however, is a false assumption. Where central authority collapses, other actors step in, creating alternative governance structures.

The evolving role of civil society

Over the years, many of the gaps left by dysfunctional or nonexistent state institutions have been filled by Congolese civil society groups, which provide essential social services such as healthcare and schooling. However, they have also been co-opted into transitional institutions – for example, holding a certain number of seats in provincial and national assemblies.

“It is precisely because civil society has been forced into this state-substitution role that many have lost their awareness and practice of its fundamental role of holding the government to account,” Lange said.

While there are hardworking civil society groups pushing to achieve lasting and sustainable peace, others show core weaknesses that prevent them from fulfilling their proper functions, she added.

Many are “politicised and riven by power struggles”, organised along ethnic lines, and “follow donor priorities instead of the priorities of the people and communities they are meant to serve,” she said, citing the study “Ending the Deadlock – Towards a new vision of peace in eastern DRC” by International Alert, which included the results of extensive consultations with local NGOs, representatives of local ethnic communities, and church and academic leaders .

The study recommends a dialogue that begins at the grassroots, is revised at the provincial level, and finalised at the national level.

A bottom-up dialogue in itself would not be enough, said Tegera, stressing the importance of making strides in three key development sectors: education, roads and energy.

“With these three in place, within 20 years, there is a chance to see an emerging middle class, able to ask for accountability and proper governance. This is the only way forward for DRC everyone should press for,” he said.

By Becky Bergdahl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 21 2012 (IPS)

Friday is not just any day – it’s the International Day of Peace. Concerts, debates and moments of silence will be held all over the planet to commemorate the ideal of global truce and tolerance.

Lilia Sales.

One person who does not celebrate Peace Day once a year but rather all year round is Lilia Maia de Morais Sales. She is vice-president of research and graduate programmes at the University of Fortaleza in Brazil, and holds a PhD in law.

In 2010, Sales designed the project “Flores do Bom Jardím”, meaning “Flowers from Bom Jardím”. The project teaches conflict mediation skills to women from a violent suburb outside the city of Fortaleza.

The Brazilian academic and activist spoke with IPS correspondent Becky Bergdahl about women’s role in peacebuilding and described how local conflict resolution can be just as complicated as international peace talks.

Q: The celebration of Sep. 21 every year is meant to promote worldwide tolerance and pacifism. Which are the biggest challenges to that goal, in your opinion?

A: Peace Day is an excellent initiative of the United Nations. But I can see at least three big challenges. First of all promoting peace requires collaborative actions among governmental and non-governmental organisations, the civil society and the private sector. Second, a broader perception of actions for peacebuilding is required, a perception that involves development, justice and environmental issues. Third, we need to be aware of the root causes of conflicts and violence.

Q: The international community has been shaken by a number of atrocious examples of hate crimes lately. Even the generally peaceful state of Norway was struck by massive terror last year. Is there any way to prevent such acts of extremism?

A: Acts of extremism can have many causes, and they must be detected in order to create effective solutions. Sometimes the cause is a clinical matter, like undiagnosed or untreated mental illness. Having said that, mental illness may be aggravated by social stressors. If you look at some cases you can see that some of the perpetrators have participated in (extremist) political debates on the Internet. What might be a way to prevent these acts of extremism is to build a more democratic society.

Q: Do women play a special role in peacebuilding? And if so, how?

A: Instead of violence, peacebuilding uses negotiation and mediation to solve conflicts. A peacebuilding process is facilitated by a third party that promotes dialogue, de-escalates hostility, and helps building consensus.

Many women are already acting as mediators, building peace in their homes, their neighbourhoods, and their workplaces. But this is only the beginning. To make a big difference in the world’s peacebuilding processes, women must conquer governmental arenas. As the number of female leaders increases, women will affect peacebuilding processes more.

Q: The International Day of Peace was established by a United Nations resolution in 1981, and the first Peace Day was celebrated in September 1982. How would you describe the development when it comes to women’s role in peacebuilding since the early 1980s?

A: The world has witnessed female leaders making a big difference while negotiating peace. Among them I would like to mention Leymah Gbowee in Liberia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. But if you study women’s participation in peace processes you notice that it is still very small. We can occasionally see women participating during negotiations, but rarely as main mediators or main negotiators.

Q: Are there any clear differences between female negotiators and their male counterparts?

A: It is very important that both sides in a negotiation share information, and studies show that women are more likely to share information than men in such situations. This means that women work in a more collaborative way, and more often get into deeper discussions, finding the issues that matter, rather than taking superficial positions.

Q: How would you describe the situation in your country, Brazil?

A: We have our first female president now, Dilma Rousseff. That is a great achievement. But we also have alarming statistics regarding violence against women, especially regarding domestic violence. That shows that somehow we still live in a barbaric and primitive world, and that we still have a long way to go before we achieve peace.

Q: You have initiated a very special project called “Flores do Bom Jardím”, that offers education for women of low socioeconomic status from the community of Bom Jardím outside the city of Fortaleza in Brazil, so that they can join the job market. You also train the women, coming from a suburb plagued by violence, in conflict resolution. Can you tell me more about the project?

A: The project was designed in 2010 as a follow-up to a federal project called “Women for Peace”. The main goal is to empower women from Bom Jardím. We offer classes in telemarketing, administration skills, hairdressing and cooking, among other things. In addition there are preparatory courses for those wishing to pursue college education.

All courses include mediation and human rights concepts. The classes are hands-on with group discussions, sharing of personal experiences, and learning through music and documentaries.

More than 500 women have participated. Now they mediate conflicts, they are joining the work market – they are becoming leaders. The testimonies from the women of Bom Jardím tell a story of a new beginning.

Q: Does local, small-scale conflict resolution, such as mediation in Bom Jardím, have anything in common with international peace mediation?

A: Yes. The community of Bom Jardím is the most violent area in Fortaleza. There are all sorts of conflicts. Conflicts in families, schools, neigbourhoods, and homicide, drug traffic and gangs. The women (that we have been teaching) have been mediating in many cases, it is like international peace mediation.

Q: Last but not least, what are your hopes for the future when it comes to peacebuilding?

A: I hope we decide that dialogue is the best way to solve conflicts. And I hope that women will be respected as leaders, and that they will lead by example.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 14 2012 (IPS)

Conflicts of interest can be viewed as drivers of societies and human development, although recourse to violence has destroyed millions of people’s lives and leaves generations wounded for decades and even centuries.

Tarja Turtia. Credit: Edouard Janin

Constituting one of society’s cornerstones, media and journalists are key actors when it comes to peacebuilding, reconciliation and institutional reconstruction in conflict-ridden societies.

Through their work they may nurture a culture of peace, defined as “values, attitudes, modes of behaviour and ways of life that reject violence and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes to solve problems through dialogue and negotiation among individuals, groups and nations” – though they also often fail in this task.

By rebuilding and strengthening capacities, the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) supports media and journalists with millions of dollars and projects around the world.

Tarja Turtia, programme specialist at UNESCO’s Division for Freedom of Expression, spoke with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about why media and journalists are important to reach out to local populations who are turning peace into lasting societal behaviour, and how they can be strengthened in this pivotal function to transform a culture of conflict resolution from simmering violence into constructive dialogue and understanding.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Involvement of local actors and creating local ownership are key success factors for lasting peace structures in post- conflict societies. Could you elucidate which function media and journalists hold in this equation?

A: It is an important feature of UNESCO’s work to assist civil society actors and local initiatives in all areas, conflict phases and levels of intervention.

Empowering local communities through capacity building of local media professionals, including marginalised and vulnerable groups, to participate in peace-building processes, and responding to their need to access critical information such as peace agreements, reconciliation initiatives, elections and public decisions taken throughout the transition period, will be among the major tasks.

The capacity of the media plays a constructive role in the post-conflict reconciliation process by promoting unbiased information, avoiding stereotypes and incitement in order to foster mutual understanding.

In some cases, the media can start debates that could not be initiated openly before. Blogging for instance, is currently an effective medium used by journalists and officials in Iraq to launch debates that they would not dare address in public.

Q: What are common features of the media and journalism landscape in post-conflict societies that peacebuilders are confronted with day in day out?

A: Peace builders are confronted with two major obstacles to the full enjoyment of human rights, as also are media-related legal frameworks that do not comply with international standards: democratic deficit and weak institutions. Indeed, insufficient constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, regulations restricting media content or Internet freedom, no freedom of information laws, lack of ICT policies promoting universal access to the Internet represent important challenges.

In post-conflict areas, the very absence of media is a challenge: Afghanistan, for instance, moved from the post-2001 situation with virtually no media to today’s vibrant, professional and pluralist Afghani media sector.

One of the main challenges faced in conflict torn societies is the lack of safety of journalists. Over the last 10 years alone, more than 500 journalists and media workers have been killed worldwide.

For example, in Nepal, civil war, ended since 2006, has created a situation whereby exercising their rights and taking the role of watchdogs, journalists put themselves at risk: a high number of threats and violence against journalists take place in many parts of the country, often as the result of investigative journalism.

Q: As to whether media has a lasting constructive impact on successful conflict transformation efforts, some say there is only anecdotal evidence for this cause-and-effect relationship. What are your experiences?

A: Free, independent and pluralistic media are essential for strengthening transparency and fighting corruption, being key facilitators of the public’s demand for accountability and responsiveness from their society’s leaders. In turn, freedom of expression, the free flow of information, and the work of the media are crucial for poverty eradication, economic and social development, i.e. to equitable and sustainable development.

The Arab Spring has been and still is a key experience in which the media, if free, independent and pluralistic, have proven their influence in facilitating dialogue and enabling national movements. They ask for accountability, inclusiveness, the credibility and legitimacy of transitional authorities and transparent and peaceful elections.

That is why UNESCO has engaged in supporting the development of the free flow of information, safety of journalists and media professionals in the conflict-driven yet promising context of the Arab Spring.

Q: How is UNESCO supporting media and journalistic work in post-conflict societies to strengthen peacebuilding and to achieve more tangible deliverables?

A: For instance, UNESCO plays a vital role in supporting election reporting. The aim regarding elections is to strengthen the capacity of the media to provide fair and balance coverage of electoral activities. This works as a vital factor for the local democratisation process. Any democracy based on the respect of freedom of expression has an electorate that can make use of their right to vote on the basis of clear and non-biased media coverage.

In Iraq, for instance, UNESCO is currently implementing a project that trains media professionals to cover the election process: they are trained to inform the electorate and to build the capacity and enhance the performance of Iraq’s media regulator whose role it is to weaken factional and sectarian divisions.

Another key area promoted by peacebuilding efforts in a post-conflict setting is ensuring that information reaches the widest public. Lack of information or misinformation can trigger conflicts, especially in post-conflicts election scenarios. UNESCO supports community radio, the main source of communication for people in remote areas in Africa, through its International Programme for the Development of Communication, IPDC, programmes. In Sierra Leone, for instance, UNESCO’s support to the Independent Radio Network (IRN) a collection of community radios ensures that the local population has timely access to accurate information, especially in electoral periods to avert recourse to violence.

UNESCO actions in Nepal two decades ago can be cited as another example: the creation of radio Sagarmatha, the first community radio station in Nepal, which piloted a new concept of media in the Himalayan country, was enabled. This project had an ice-breaking impact on the country, paving the way to the spontaneous proliferation of community radio stations in Nepal in the late 90s. In the difficult years that followed, the community radios movement has been a force striving for peace and democracy as well as for sustainable development.

Q: Does constructive media and journalistic work get sufficient attention as supportive elements in peacebuilding efforts?

A: The level of attention this role attracts differs from country to country. For instance, in Sierra Leone, the peacebuilding efforts have mostly focused on building media institutions and capacities; while this has not been the case in Liberia or Cote d’Ivoire.

It may not be easy to deduce a cause-effect relationship, but of the three post-conflict states, Sierra Leone seems to be the one that is developing faster into norms of democratic governance and stability.

More generally, while the importance of media workers within a peacebuilding process is generally acknowledged, insufficient attention is paid to the needs journalists have in order to be useful to democratisation. Indeed, only with well-trained journalists who understand their rights and responsibilities can help media take its crucial place in strengthening the democracy and disseminating information to people.

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