For almost ten years, the small West African country of Guinea-Bissau has been subject to security sector reform as part of international peacebuilding interventions. Since gaining independence in 1973-74, the former Portuguese colony has been characterized by political instability, coups d’état, military overthrow attempts, and the interference of military factions within politics.
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The Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) process in Colombia was built nationally, but it was consolidated at the sub-national level. The Mayoral Offices of Bogota and Medellin developed programmes for the reintegration of ex-combatants that played a crucial role in both sustaining and contesting the national policy of reintegration. Analyzing these policies contributes to the understanding of the role that municipal authorities play in underpinning and redefining the DDR national policies.
Read More Power relations between the local and the international lie at the very core of gendered analyses about hybrid peace processes. We need to recognize the power of both the local and international, and to reflect upon the complexity of experience. Who experiences war? And what are the effects of these experiences?
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The Peacebuilding Centre is a Canadian NGO that consolidates good practice for peacebuilding and human security. Over the years, it has produced a consolidation of operational tools to make it easier for peacebuilding practitioners to find practical approaches to: engage with fragile states, conduct Early Warning – Early Response assessments to address root causes of conflict, and design conflict-sensitive approaches for project programming in fragile states.
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When do disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes succeed? By: Lema Ijtemaye...
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At the request of interim President Dioncounda Traoré, France led a military intervention to assist the Malian army and AFISMA in retaking Northern Mali. Since then, France has made significant gains and the fighting has subsided. At the national level, Malians have begun to implement a number of initiatives.
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Throughout the years, scholarly work coupled with the findings by Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, have found that mineral wealth was not at the root of the country’s previous conflict. Today, however, mineral wealth represents a flashpoint that could reignite mass violence and threaten the country’s peace.
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The problems of donor coordination and horizontal integration in Haiti are well documented. The research project I am involved in, which focuses on Vertical Integration in Peacebuilding, hopes to shed some light on an overlooked relationship between local, grassroots efforts at community violence reduction and a distinctly top-down, UN-led police reform process (itself a peacebuilding project on a country-wide scale).
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