1. Peacebuilding and Reconstruction in aftermath of conflict – The Case of Liberia
and Sierra Leone
Support for peace building and reconstruction: State rebuilding after state collapse often
requires a strong support for peace building and reconstruction measures. Peace in this
context has often been interpreted as mere absence of war and state rebuilding is often
seen only in terms of physical reconstruction. While physical reconstruction may be a
necessary departure point for state rebuilding, the defining characteristic of state
rebuilding from a human security approach is the presence of holistic security and a
model of conflict management, which emphasises the fundamentals of military security,
democratisation and consensus building, development, economic reform, human rights
and human dignity for the citizens to engage their rulers.
Therefore, although the conventional wisdom is to ignore it, the security required
in the immediate aftermath of conflict might also require higher rather than lower
security expenditure to enable the state and citizens cope with the impact of conflict -
rehabilitating refugees and the internally displaced, providing for a secure, safe and
enabling environment in which development initiatives can succeed and reintegrating
former combatants into society and economy. In situations where conditions of poverty
prevail after post war conflict, it is reasonable to predict a correlation between the lack of
development opportunities in terms of direct income generation to survivors and an
increase in criminality and conflict.
For policy makers, especially international donors who just want to “move the
money” because of the domestic pressure from disaster management and relief agencies,
there is always the pressing need to construe their role in terms of immediate restoration
of peace and stability, rather than security and development through the promotion of
common values and the rule of law. The concentration on elections and elections
monitoring in say Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria in recent times gave an impression
that what mattered most was the election, not democracy nor a recognition that elections
are not enough to guarantee democracy and development. Experience has since shown
that while there are immediate tasks that must be addressed in terms of peace building
and reconstruction in every conflict situation - disaster relief and management,
repatriation and reintegration of refugees and reduction in the proliferation of small arms
and clearance of explosives, these are not the most successful ingredients of a successful
peace building strategy.
To promote sustainable security and peace building strategies therefore - African
leaders and international development agencies must take a comprehensive look at peace
building and reconstruction strategies treating them as a continuum with short term (relief
and emergency aid and creating a secure and enabling environment); medium term (peace
support operations) and long term (reconstruction, democracy & development)
components in an integrated manner. Donor countries should be encouraged to foster
greater coherence amongst their own policies at an inter-agency level, as well as within
their own regional structures (such as EU, OECD, etc). A good example as we pointed
out in the preceding section is the fact that arms sales from developed countries is often at
variance with the emphasis the same countries place on conflict prevention and security
sector governance.
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2. Equally, in this respect, there is a need for stronger cooperation between the
Bretton Woods institutions, the UN Systems and other multi and bi-lateral development
agencies as well as independent development institutions to reduce the overzealous focus
on achieving fiscal discipline and macro-economic stability at the expense of efforts to
protect social spending. Donor responses have often involved conditionalities relating to
automatic decreases in military spending and reductions of military and other security
forces with no attention paid to the expensive nature of security and the objective security
threats that each country faces. Especially in post conflict situations, this realization
should inform international attitudes towards security sector transformation on the one
hand, and post conflict reconstruction on the other.
Third, it is extremely important that international institutions should seize the
momentum provided by the weak capacity of the state to align external assistance with
local needs and efforts, not an opportunity to impose received wisdom and new theories
of development. This is extremely important in the context of recent claims that NEPAD
is Africa owned - a claim that is rejected by many Africans. Where state institutional
capacity is weak, an immense burden of responsibility is placed on IFIs and development
agencies in which real dialogue with the people and wide consultations underscore
whatever actions are taken. Finally, international donors cannot ignore the international
context in their response to peace building and reconstruction efforts. How, for example,
has the often convoluted linkage between trans-national corporations, proliferation of
arms and promotion of neo-liberal globalising trends by the industrial world undermine
the success of security and development reforms in countries emerging out of conflict,
especially within the context of an unstable region in which domino effect is real rather
than imagined.
These are some of the issues that are central to any discussion of the policy lever
on peace building and reconstruction efforts and the extent to which the guideline
document considers them critically would determine the possibilities of success that
might accompany critical intervention.
The Challenge of strengthening the territorial state: As has been argued above, this
thinking itself is a product of the state-centric notions of security that dominated
traditional thinking in the cold war era. Since the state is increasingly seen as
unrepresentative and illegitimate in Africa however, are there conditions under which war
might be seen to be a legitimate means of removing regime types that promote conflicts
and in which leaders have encroached upon common pool resources. To this end, some
questions might suffice in any consideration of complex political situations rather than
focus exclusively on state monopoly of means of coercion. This is not to suggest that
states do not have legitimate needs for security which might necessitate legitimate
procurement and monopoly of means of coercion, but this has to be demonstrated to
ensure that security is treated as common public good, not just regime good. It may
therefore be necessary to consider:
• Under which circumstances, if any, is war necessary to remove bad governments?
That is how do we distinguish between justifiable rebellion and needless conflict?
• How is regional economic and political co-operation built between and among
states to address the pathology of militarism?
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3. • How can state-centric definitions of security be de-emphasised, and the role of
civil society in peace building increased in the quest for common values?
• How is democratic control of the military to be built in states undergoing political
transition or moving from war to peace - through parliamentary oversight,
effective institutions of governance and genuine interaction between the military
and the rest of society?
Acknowledging the need to ask these questions should help to address some of the policy
challenges posed for conflict transformation and security sector reform within the
NEPAD context and subject state monopoly of violence to international and regional
checks. Although there is evidence to suggest that African leaders and their international
partners now accept the argument about broadening the agenda, but the commitment to
the mutually reinforcing interaction between the values of democracy, equity and
sustainability still remain subordinate to the core need for macro-economic stability and
integration into the international political economy in the NEPAD document. This is why
many are still suspicious of the African leaders and their development partners’
commitment to a human security approach in spite of the new rhetoric about local
ownership and social capital.
Promoting social coherence through civil society development and multi-cultural
tolerance
If peace-building is taken as the sum total of activities that will support peace making and
conflict transformation: demobilisation, re-structuring of the local security system -
police and the military; resettlement of refugees and the internally displaced persons;
removal of dangerous weapons - mines and other unexploded firearms, reconstruction of
shattered infrastructure and humanitarian and disaster relief - very few still advocate that
this could be done with the exclusion of civil society. Indeed, even African leaders and
international development agencies now see civil society as key to the successful
implementation of these various aspects of post-conflict peace building process. In
discussing rights based approach to governance and security sector transformation, local
ownership and development of social capital rests with the civil society, but it is
important to place this within the context of developing institutional mechanisms for the
management of diversity and difference and incorporating international human rights
framework into domestic law. Hence, the rights of the people to their resources should
not be compromised at the altar of encouraging foreign direct investment, especially
where this undermines environmental security.
Since states are usually products of war and rampage, it might sound far-fetched
to base the quest for tolerance on the notion of reclaiming the militarised mind through
the creation of structures capable of mediating conflict between belligerent parties.
Perhaps, an explanation of this construction is necessary here. It is suggested that the
military option now prevalent in several parts of the African continent is the inevitable
consequence of the acute nature of internal contradictions and the almost total absence of
democratic institutions that can assist in the management of deep-rooted conflicts.
It was assumed in policy and development circles that support for neo-liberal
democracy will help achieve this objective, hence there was the enthusiasm for
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4. democracy assistance and ‘good governance’ in the early 1990s and donor countries
made some efforts to move economic assistance away from former concerns about
stimulating economic growth to an emphasis on political objectives, including support for
processes of democratisation and building of civil society.
Although the above represented a shift from the days of the super-power
ideological rivalry, even this shift in the leadership’s thinking and IFIs’ assistance has
concentrated primarily on the reform of the public sector and involvement of the ‘civil
society’ to the extent that it promotes the neo-liberal paradigm, not on an alternative
vision of bottom-up reforms driven by societal consensus. The fact that many of the
transitions of the last decade in Africa now approximate to - at best electoral democracies
and at worst elected dictatorships, has raised new questions on how to deepen the
democratic content of current reforms in a process oriented, participatory and accountable
manner. At every level, the idea of constitutionalising democratising polities that have
largely functioned as ‘virtual’ democracies along multifaceted lines is taking shape.
Today, the fact that the struggle for reconstituting the African state is taking place
in no fewer than twenty African states in Angola, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Cote
d’Ivoire, Swaziland and Lesotho, to mention but a few, underscores a paradigmatic shift
from constitutionality to constitutionalism, a situation where constitutions are now seen
as tools for building bridges between the state and civil society, a social compact based
upon a foundation of consensus among the constituent elements within the polity and
between them and the state in the quest for common value systems. What has to be
emphasised however for the purpose of NEPAD and human security is the importance of
an organic link between the constitution as a rule of law instrument incorporating
international human rights framework and primarily concerned with restraining
government excesses, and the constitution as a legitimisation of power structures and
relations based on a broad social consensus and the values in diverse societies. In short, if
NEPAD is to promote the mutually reinforcing role of development, security and
democracy, the task today is largely between bridging the gap between “juristic
constitutionalism” and “political and socio-economic constitutionalism” in the search for
common core values if the ‘New Africa’ espoused in the NEPAD document is to have
meaning and be accountable to its citizens.
The core issues around values in NEPAD can only be addressed in the context of
principles and values to which all Africans willingly subscribe. Values of representation,
ownership, accessibility to all levels of government, accountability, openness and
collective responsibility. CSSDCA has been doing a lot of work on developing a
consensus driven value systems which is what would be the subject of the peer review
mechanism. NEPAD is also developing a similar mechanism in preparation for the
Durban summit of the African Union. While this is welcome by all, the scepticism that
has attended the search for common values to be promoted across Africa has been
informed by the anti-democratic and reprehensible behaviour of some of the leaders who
are at the forefront of the NEPAD campaign and their total contempt for some of the
supposed values to which they have committed themselves. In spite of this general
scepticism, constitutionalism as a social compact remains the best route for forging the
kind of value system and reorientation that can deepen our democracy in order to prevent
conflict and build peace.
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5. Building assets that provide security against disasters and economic shocks
Conventionally, the way most development agencies have promoted the building of
assets against disasters and economic shocks has been to focus on macro-economic
stability strategies like Structural adjustment reforms, electoral democracies and support
of measures that seek to provide the enabling environment for foreign direct investment
and the global integration of the economy - a mutual pursuit of political and economic
liberalisation. This is the fundamental principle guiding the NEPAD document. So far,
the logic of trickle down economics has failed to produce an integrated world economy in
which all zones are winners. Indeed, as Caroline Thomas and Peter Wilkin argue,
In the process of globalisation, the continent (Africa) has quite literally been left behind in terms
of the distribution of the spoils of the process. The promised advantages of economic
restructuring, as hailed by the IMF, World Bank and individual developed countries, have not
been borne out. Foreign investment fails to flow in; debt burdens continue; commodity prices
fluctuate; environmental degradation proceeds…and industrialisation fails to occur. (Thomas &
Wilkin: 1998).
This clearly contradicts the core assumption of globalisation that wealth would
automatically be created when the free market gains universal acceptance in the world.
By arguing that the way to build assets against shocks is not via the creation of local self
sufficiency, but national economies should concentrate on what they can contribute to the
world economy, globalisation ignores the comparative advantage of the North, locks
African states further into relative powerlessness by creating conditions for conflict
which further weakens the mediatory role of the states. Instead, it empowers those elites
within the state who can form part of the convoluted network in business and government
capable of acting independently of the juridical state. The fallout of this globalising trend
is the unregulated trade in mineral resources, proliferation of arms and narcotics and the
illicit trade in narcotics all of which ultimately undermine food security, environmental
security and the security of the individual - all factors responsible for conflict today. It
has also helped in deepening the rural-urban divide, fostered inter-generational strife
occasioned by youth frustration and exacerbated the scourge of refugees and the
internally displaced, all of which have moved the hapless below the poverty line and
moved them closer to violence and conflict.
In my view therefore, the greatest assets against shocks and disasters ultimately
lie with the development of human resources, better management of natural resource
endowment and respect for local ownership of the reform agenda whether in determining
the role of the State or in arriving at the most effective poverty inducing mechanisms. In
fairness, the NEPAD document pays some attention to this, but only within the context of
free and unregulated market. Hence, it is also useful to examine and analyse individual
situations on their merit, rather than assume that the market is God. This is of course not
to suggest that market has no role in reforming states structures. It is to say that there are
no universal models of the market as providing the best assets against shocks and
disasters, hence leaders and donor agencies must learn from their own experiences of the
market, security and public sector reforms in formulating realistic policies that are not
driven by dogma, even as they admit that certain assumptions undergird their work based
on their stated values and principles.
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