Building peace from within: An examination of community-based peacebuilding and transitions in Africa

2nd April 2014

Building peace from within: An examination of community-based peacebuilding and transitions in Africa

Sylvester Bongani Maphosa

A well-informed and timely volume, integrating peacebuilding approaches for transforming contemporary conflicts in Africa. Exploring the challenges and lessons in post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding, Building Peace from Within, is a seminal volume for graduate and undergraduate courses in peacebuilding, conflict resolution, peacekeeping and related fields.  It is also a ‘must-have’ for practitioners in the field including government and policy makers.

The book seeks to examine how successful models of building ‘peace from within’ in the African context function. It draws emerging lessons to provide critical recommendations on policy, practice and academia – our primary audience. While there are numerous examples of failures of conflict resolution in Africa, shown by intractable conflict axes, less attention is paid to successes.

While acknowledging the challenges that exist, this edited volume provides positive examples of building peace from within in fragile contexts through many forms of initiatives and actions at different levels: community-based (through individual and/or collective local peace initiatives), government (through ministries and/or departments), and regional (through external and/or multilateral infrastructure for peace).

As a guiding principle the notion of building peace from within draws from the idea of community regeneration, which describes voluntary and peaceful activities of grassroots actors that reflect their broader interests of building peaceful communities and existence.

Edited by Sylvester Bongani Maphosa, Laura DeLuca and Alphonse Keasley

Sylvester Bongani Maphosa is Chief Research Specialist in Governance and Security Programme at the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA).

Laura DeLuca is a lecturer in Global Studies and Anthropology at the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-B).

Alphonse Keasley currently holds the position of Assistant Vice-Chancellor at the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-B).