Seminar dates: (Either 18-19 or 19-20 September 2024)
Venue: Machakos University
Email: Jacinta.mwende@uonbi.ac.ke, africauniversityseminarseries@gmail.com
Seminar Costs: APN/NextGen Program of SSRC will take care of transport, accommodation and subsistence costs for all participants during the seminar.
Theme: Beyond Decoloniality: Exploring People-Centered Approaches to Peace and Development in Africa
A review of Africa’s peace and development landscape is indicative of several challenges such as extreme poverty, climate change, natural resources conflicts, inter and intra-state conflicts, transboundary conflicts, terrorism and violent extremism, poor governance, food insecurity, economic and health crises among many others. Preventing conflict and sustaining peace are key priorities for national governments as well as regional and international institutions such as the African Union (AU), Africa’s Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and the United Nations (UN). The AU and its African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) emphasizes the provision of “African-Centered Solutions.” These “solutions” are however state centric; those interventions being developed and implemented by African institutions and decision makers. Most peace and development interventions have been externally driven and state-centric with the belief that state building will feed into peacebuilding and development, which will trickle down to the grassroots. For instance, the IMF and World bank have been accused of forcing developing countries to create conditions that benefit Western corporations and governments through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and austerity measures in exchange of financial and technical support (Ismi 2004; Muhumed and Gaas 2016) supposedly to spur development. Such interventions have however been criticized for stifling economic and human development across Africa (Action Aid report 2023). This has implications for peace and security.
In recent years, there have been calls to ‘decolonize’ and ‘localize’ peace and development initiatives in Africa to move away from state centric and externally driven solutions to bottom up approaches that are people centered. Decoloniality focuses on the “matrix of power”; the process of undoing colonial worldviews, institutions and impacts that began with colonization. It interrogates the lasting political, economic, social and environmental impacts of coloniality on developing nations (Schirch 2022; William and Mary 2021). A decolonial approach to peace and development prioritizes the needs and visions of local populations as a more holistic approach to supporting genuinely locally owned solutions (Mathews, 2022), while also recognizing that ‘the local’ is a space of diverse and competing actors (Schirch, 2022).
How then can local and international actors draw on the knowledge, capacity and resilience of local communities to ensure sustainable peace and development? To what extent do national and international actors consider the histories, values, epistemologies, expertise and experiences of local communities when designing peace and development strategies? Without romanticizing local people centered approaches, the AUSS-K seminar will seek to interrogate the extent to which there can be a ‘shift of power’ and focus from externally driven state centric approaches to community-based people centered approaches to peace and development. We invite papers that critically interrogate the prospects, opportunities and challenges for people centered ‘localized’ and indigenous approaches to peace and development in Africa. Papers can explore the extent to which local conflict, peace and development processes in Africa interact with and are shaped by global structures, politics, and actors. The seminar will seek to understand how dominant narratives on peace and development in Africa can be said to be externally driven by the global hegemonic principles that stand in the way of realizing people centered local approaches.
- Epistemologies of decoloniality: peace and development in Africa
- Indigenous and local knowledge and Africa’s peace, security and development
- Local, regional and global approaches to the peace-development Nexus
- Digitality, Peace and Development
- Silencing the Guns, Agenda 2063 and Africa’s peace and development
- En-Gendering People-Centered Approaches to Peace and Development
Expected Seminar output.
A special issue of a peer-reviewed journal