Peacebuilding Handbook

Peacebuilding in Africa, as is the case globally, is constantly evolving. Practitioners in this field are regularly faced with challenging dynamics that shape the approaches needed to enhance peacebuilding. Over the past two decades, the environments and situations traditionally known to host conflict have evolved. Through studies, practitioners have found that opposing actors and their interests have greatly influenced conflict trajectories. These developments have further impacted the strategies generally used to maintain and enhance sustainable peace. These are but a few of the challenges peacebuilding practitioners, actors and entities face in the course of their interventions. Due to the unstable nature of conflict, peacebuilding has had to progress to adapt to today’s conflict dynamics. Due to the constant need to keep up with existing and evolving challenges, constant re-examination of the approaches and normative frameworks that target peacebuilding interventions is needed. Peacebuilding is crucial for social transformation, it is needed by those who choose to use violence as well as those who elect a more passive approach as a means of resolving their disputes. Peacebuilding contributes to longer-term stability, and eliminates acts of violence. For peace to be sustained, it is crucial that peacebuilding practitioners, actors and entities formulate and implement strategies that lay solid foundations for economic recovery and development in fragile countries. This involves the building of solid institutions that can support transformational journeys, as well as developing infrastructures to shepherd communities and people together towards resolving disputes through dialogue and mediation. Ultimately, peacebuilding is important. Not only is it indispensable in dealing with legacies that cultivate intractability, but it further recognises and addresses the root causes of conflict. For more than 20 years, ACCORD has been engaged in capacity-building initiatives that increase the individual and collective knowledge and skills of key peacebuilding stakeholders. The aim of these enterprises has always been to help peacebuilders to better understand the environment and contexts in which they work and the processes through which they can support local and national actors to lead their own countries’ or communities’ own peacebuilding processes. To this end this handbook, amongst others, underscores the central role of local and national ownership in securing sustainable peace.