This second issue of 2022 contains four articles and a book review. Two of the articles focus on different aspects of transitional justice. We also pay special attention to South Sudan, with both the book review and the article on the inclusion of the 14-Mile Area addressing aspects related to conflict resolution in South Sudan.
Our first article is by Garang Yach James and Joseph Geng Akech of the University of Juba and James Alic Garang of the Upper Nile University. Their paper examines the questions, fairness and implications of the inclusion of the 14-Mile Area in the September 2012 Cooperation Agreement signed between Sudan and South Sudan. Among other things, they advocate that local communities should be given an opportunity to manage the issues of access to grazing areas by Sudanese nomads based on community-to-community negotiations.
Our second article is by Khanyisela Moyo from Ulster University. She examines the role of civil society as a litigation actor in Africa and reviews the kind of criminal and civil litigations that civil society initiate and their implication for how transitional justice is understood and practised.
Our third article is by Shirambere Philippe Tunamsifu from the Université Libre des Pays des Grands Lacs, in Goma, the Democractic Republic of the Congo (DRC). His article analyses why colonial-era crimes in the DRC were not investigated, and finds this is because of gaps in the legal framework, the configuration of the judiciary, and an informal agreement between the DRC and the Belgian governments.
Our final article is by Angela Shoko, who is a governance specialist and part-time teaching assistant at the Africa Leadership and Management Academy (ALMA), an affiliate college of the National University of Science and Technology in Zimbabwe. She analyses the participation of local churches in grassroots conflict transformation during the political crises in Zimbabwe from 2005 to 2020.
This edition of the journal also includes a book review by James Okuk, a Senior Research Fellow with the South Sudan Center for Strategic and Policy Studies (CSPS). He reviews the book ‘The Politics of Fear in South Sudan: Generating Chaos, Creating Conflict’, written byDaniel Akech Thiong and published by Zed Books (Bloomsbury Publishing) in 2021.
We hope that you will find this collection of articles by African researchers on African conflict resolution experiences valuable for your research and practice. ACCORD values empirical research on specific conflicts and conflict resolution initiatives in Africa.