"I have to say that there was a questioning," Comfort Ero explained tentatively, "of whether we had learnt anything at all -- internationally, regionally, or locally." She was referring to a period of rethinking after a series of conflicts in Africa -- notably in Central African Republic, Mali, and South Sudan -- shook policymakers' confidence that they had figured out how to preserve peace and to build peace.
That period of rethinking continues today. Comfort Ero has been crisis group's Nairobi-based Africa programme director since January 2011. She previously worked with crisis group as West Africa project. Ero directs the Africa programme at international crisis group, a 21-year-old conflict prevention organization. Ero continued: "From 2012 through 2015, you've seen a reversal, or regression.
I think that all of this is encapsulated in the increased inadequacies or dysfunctional nature of both regional architectures and international systems. Then you fast forward to the Islamic State and related developments, and you wonder whether the policy toolbox, as currently configured, is incapable of dealing with realities on the ground.
You begin to question whether the mechanisms we have for so long nurtured and cherished, and refined since the end of the Cold War -- peacekeeping, peacebuilding, international justice, conflict prevention -- how relevant they really are."
There is no doubt that peacebuilding needs to occur and that governments and civil society are vital to achieving it. But the disappointment and even despair brought on by the recent surge in conflicts are real and, arguably, are both eased and worsened by Africa's successes in other realms.
African economic growth weathered the global recession of 2008-09 well. In the past ten years, the 11 largest sub-Saharan economies grew at more than twice the global average, even as inflation declined. Population growth and relative youthfulness--sub-Saharan under-15 population shares range from 28 per cent to over 43 per cenr in major countries, against a global average of 25.8 per cent--suggest that African economies will continue to expand.
In 1970, 2.5 million sub-Saharan Africans lived in a democracy; in 2013, the figure was 387 million. The United Nations development programme's human development index improved between 1970 and 2013 in every African region except the Mediterranean littoral.
But that exception is telling, as it is largely due to the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Against a generally positive economic and social backdrop across the continent, in many cases political conflict worsened. North Africa saw chaos and coups;
chronic conflicts in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo ground on; semi-failed states like Zimbabwe and Eritrea remained mired; a once-hailed new generation of leaders proved reluctant to give up power; states thought to be reasonably stable, like Mali, Burundi, and Central African Republic, slipped into violence; and South Sudan, the pearl of internationalism when it became independent from Sudan in 2013, took just three years to collapse into bloodletting.
While neither interreligious conflict nor Muslim militancy were at all new in Africa, the resilience of al-Shabab in Somalia and the rise of groups like Boko Haram and al-Qaeda across the Sahel were unexpected and even shocking.
A revived African Union and strengthened regional economic groupings fed hopes for "African solutions to African problems." Yet a more sophisticated continental security architecture was not quick to show results.
For Cyril Obi, a program director at the New York-based Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and director of the African peacebuilding network, "The time has come to challenge received ideas about peacebuilding."As a set of techniques, peacebuilding has a short history.
The term is commonly traced back to the 1970s and the work of Johan Galtung, a Norwegian polymath whose academic contributions range from economics to theology to mathematics. Galtung's vision was of a decentralized process of bottom-up reconstruction that identified and addressed the root causes of conflicts.
This new focus redirected attention--away from warlords, armies, and the "will to power," toward economic deprivation, resource competition, ethnic and sectarian disputes, and other factors that were often outside the direct purview of modern states.
The United Nations' agenda for peace, released by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1992, both ratified the importance of peacebuilding and brought it into a multilateral system constructed by and for nation states.
In that early post-Cold War period, the concurrent rise of civil society, nongovernmental organizations, and academic disciplines devoted to the analysis of conflict and peace led to something like an international movement that brought together state and nonstate actors in the pursuit of peace.
If not quite the end of history, this was perhaps a fundamental reorientation away from the dominant modern pattern of inter-state competitive conflict.
The UN's own peacekeeping efforts took on some of the mandates of peacebuilding while expanding dramatically: the Security Council authorized a total of 20 new operations between 1989 and 1994, raising the number of peacekeepers from 11,000 to 75,000.
The achievements of these new "multidimensional" missions were mixed. In particular, the failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 prompted much official introspection, resulting in the 2000 "Report of the Panel on United Nations peace operations," usually known as the Brahimi report (after Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian diplomat who headed the panel).
The UN peacebuilding commission and peacebuilding support office began operations in 2005, followed the next year by the UN peacebuilding fund--elements of what became known as the UN's "peacebuilding architecture."
The integration of peacebuilding into an international system dominated by existing states brought with it funding, military resources, and a certain legitimacy. It also meant that peacebuilding efforts that were not congruent with existing state interests--or that might even run counter to those interests--were difficult to mount, at best.
That challenge is a universal one, but it is especially keen in Africa. Most African states were originally constructed in the course of European imperial competition and, ultimately, ratified in the process of decolonization, beginning in the 1950s. There is considerable artifice involved in the construction of most, if not all, modern nation states.
This is the case whether, like the United States and other countries of the Americas, they grew out of the long dissolution of the British and Iberian empires or, as in the Middle E
ast and the Balkans, they emerged from the rather more sudden collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.
Recent events have shown that even relatively stable modern and democratic states can face secessionist challenges and periods of significant reconfiguration.
Nonetheless, the relationships between state and society in Africa--within the compressed post-colonial time frame of a few decades--have proved to be notably fraught. The wary embrace of peacebuilding by African states and state-led institutions has meant that peacebuilding in Africa is caught up in the rivalries of those states and hampered by their flaws and shortcomings.
The dominance of what is called the "technical" approach to peacebuilding--engineering legal, electoral, and administrative structures aimed at solidifying liberal, democratic states within existing borders--faces growing skepticism. The agony of South Sudan is seen by many as one instance of the failure of this broader, Western-inspired model.
"The conflicts we are seeing on the continent really are in large part a renegotiation of the existing states," Olonisakin maintains. "African leaders and populations are moving in opposite directions, they are moving divergently.
Populations are learning to subsist, to creatively live their lives in spite of their governments. This is the story of a generation, unfolding slowly before our eyes."
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