A ‘Peace Agreement and Durable Peace in Africa’ workshop will be jointly hosted by the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) and Uppsala University in April 2010. ACCORD’s Knowledge Production Department (KPD) will be hosting 10 authors from around Africa, who will contribute to an edited volume on peace agreements in Africa. The aim of the workshop is to discuss why some peace agreements fail while others succeed, and assess the contribution of these agreements to durable peace.
The book is born out of ACCORD’s partnership with the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University and is co-edited by Dr Grace Maina and Prof Erik Melander who will both be attending this authors’ forum. The two-day event will be held at the Coastlands Umhlanga Hotel in Durban on the 11 and 12 April 2011, where the commissioned authors will be brought together to present their chapters to their peers and reviewers. “The workshop will be a forum for the authors to discuss chapters, for critique and learning with the view of fine tuning the final draft” says Martha Mutisi, a senior researcher in KPD. She summed up the workshop as a reflective platform for intellectual debate.
The edited volume will include analytical discussions of peace agreements in 10 countries, namely: Angola, Burundi, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, DRC, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. This volume will serve as a single central deposit of knowledge on different country experiences with peace agreements. It will aim to contribute to existing studies on durable peace in Africa and studies on successful and failed peace agreements. The focus here is to encourage contribution from an African perspective.
This work will seek to inform ACCORD’s intervention activities on conflict resolution and management, particularly mediation. KPD is keyed up to host the workshop and is optimistic that there will be more opportunities to bring together scholars, who are experts in their own right, to discuss and analyze conflicts in Africa.
