PEACEBUILDING IN AFRICA
Post-conflict rebuilding resources lacking
The Centre for Conflict Resolution has remarkable achievements in Africa, but key initiatives remain hobbled by lack of political will and funding, writes Adekeye Adebajo
As I end my 13 years as executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, herewith some reflections on my two-and-a-half decades in the field of peacebuilding before riding off into the Johannesburg sunset. The past 25 years have been something of a personal intellectual and policy odyssey since I entered the field as the Cold War was ending in 1990. This period has seen tremendous changes: the launching of a Nigerian-led peacekeeping mission to halt Liberia’s civil war in 1990 (the subject of my Oxford doctoral thesis), the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the first democratic election in SA in 1994. I witnessed apartheid’s funeral and Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration, while serving as a UN electoral observer in this country. Shortly after, I also served a year with the UN mission in Western Sahara. In the second post-Cold War decade, five more years were spent at the International Peace Institute (IPI) in New York, where I worked to sup...
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